INTRODUCTION—Who Writes History?

“History is written by the Victors” as Churchill once famously said.  Or may have said.  Other sources variously attribute the line to Napoleon, Machiavelli, Orwell, Nehru and, er, Dan Brown.  It’s come to something when a celebrated quote about unreliable reporting can’t be reliably reported.

But of course Winnie (or Dan) was referring to Military (and to a lesser extent Political) history.  What about Popular Culture?  Who writes the history of bread and circuses?  The obvious answer is initially amateur enthusiasts, swiftly followed by professional academics keen to annex the underlying social significance of whatever rubbish is currently distracting the great unwashed.  Which bring us naturally enough to Horror Films.  But the essential point remains: whoever writes the history—particularly the early history—controls the Narrative. The pioneer’s version swiftly becomes Received Opinion, and a generation can pass before some iconoclastic young rebel declares the old fuddie-duddies have got it completely wrong. Then the process begins again.

So, at what point did horror films begin to be taken seriously?  And when we say “taken seriously”, we effectively mean “have dedicated history books written about them?”  The answer is essentially the mid 1960s, though—to properly understand the context—we first have to go a decade further back, and the breakthrough year of 1957.  In May, Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein premiered in London, kickstarting Britain’s revolutionary gothic-horror revival, and just five months later in October, Screen Gems (the television subsidiary of Columbia) released a package of 52 Universal fantasy-classics to US TV-syndication for the first time (under the banner ‘Shock Theater’), kickstarting America’s re-evaluation of its own horror heritage.  Each were separate smash-hits, and cross-pollination quickly followed as both sides of the Atlantic simultaneously went monster-crazy.  By early 1958 it was clear there was a gap in the US market for some kind of popular (ie unrepentantly lowbrow) periodical exploiting the new horror-boom, and young publisher Jim Warren plus his fannish editor Forry Ackerman were ready to meet the challenge.

The story of Famous Monsters of Filmland (FM) magazine—which debuted in Feb 1958—is already well documented and needs no further discussion.  Less well-known (but for our purposes equally significant) is the generally overlooked story of how FM (and its numerous later rip-offs / stable-mates) arrived in Britain.  Fred Thorpe (1913-1999) started out running a pre-war Mobile library service around his rural Leicestershire, then (following 1946 RAF demob) moved into ‘pulp’ publishing, going into partnership with the Porter Group (originally a builders’ merchant) to create distributors Thorpe and Porter, based in Oadby.  T&P’s distinctive circular ink-stamps (featuring the smudgy UK price) became a familiar sight on the covers of three decades-worth of imported US comics and magazines, particularly once draconian import-restrictions began to lift in 1957.  T&P had a bumpy history, being taken over twice (1966/1975) before finally dissolving in 1977.  By then Thorpe himself was long-gone, having retired to set up pioneering Large Print publishers Ulverscroft (the name borrowed from his Leics farm) in 1964.  He received an OBE in 1969, and by the time of his death was a pillar of the Establishment, his Guardian obituary reverently describing T&P as having “specialised in publishing children’s classics”—a somewhat disingenuous assertion to say the least.  T&P were in fact in fairly regular trouble with the law throughout their existence, as Thorpe and his successors continually pushed the boundaries of what they thought they could get away with.

The British ‘Horror Comic’ panic of 1954 is similarly well documented, and the resulting Act of Parliament (The Children’s and Young Persons [Harmful Publications] Act 1955) had a temporarily sobering effect on what T&P and their competitors were prepared to risk handling. But with no actual prosecutions arising, by the early 60s caution had faded and Famous Monsters et al were being shipped in wholesale.  The only blip occurred in 1962, when the regally censorious Lady Snow (author Pamela Hansford Johnson) complained to the Attorney General about two cheap FM competitors she had somehow got hold of—Horror Monsters and World Famous Creatures—demanding that they be banned.  Confronted with grainy photos of the Creature From the Black Lagoon accompanied by the usual strained puns, the AG politely declined to prosecute.

UK distribution remained extremely erratic however, with most such imports being circulated around the port-towns and major provincial rail stations.  Right up to the late-70s, one of the highlights of any trip to the seaside for a young British horror fan was an opportunity to browse the spinner-racks of seedy backstreet newsagents to see what might turn up—the present writer vividly recalls the thrill of finding Quasimodo’s Monster Magazine in the site-shop of a North Wales caravan park c1976 for example.  But despite the failure of Lady Snow’s earlier efforts, the trade were then still wary following a nasty shock they had received in 1970.  That March, T&P’s chief rival importer, L.Miller & Co (Hackney) Ltd, had been raided and five US horror comics seized (Tales From the Tomb, Weird, Tales of Voodoo, Horror Tales and Witches Tales)—Millers immediately wrote to their New York supplier cancelling shipments of all similar material until the case was resolved.  When finally hauled before Tower Hamlets magistrates on 22nd Oct, Millers gamely argued that the magazines in question had (i) already been through UK Customs without challenge, and (ii) were in their opinion clearly Adult publications anyway.  This was to no avail, and they were fined £25 plus £20 costs—the nominal amounts due, as the magistrate conceded, to it being the first successful prosecution of its kind under a now fifteen-year-old law.  But the judgement meant all such material suddenly vanished from British newsagents for a couple of years, as fan Dave Hartley recalls:

“…in the 60s not only could you find things on holiday that you’d never see at home, but even back at home there were big differences in what particular shops would carry.  On the one hand there were respectable newsagents that wouldn’t stock anything, whether homegrown or imported, which might be classed as ‘trash’.  When original US comics appeared in the 60s after the import ban was lifted, some shops only sold Dell or Archie or Gold Key, but not DC or Marvel, and many didn’t carry any imported comics at all.  At the other extreme there were newsagents which carried the full range of the material imported and published by L Miller, Thorpe and Porter and their even less respectable competitors….

…..Miller’s 1970 prosecution actually had a big impact on me at the time.  In 1965 I’d bought my first copy of Warren’s Famous Monsters of Filmland and the wardrobe doors to monsterkid Narnia magically swung open.  I became obsessed with horror films, but since I was still too young to sneak in to see them, initially I had to content myself with the magazines about them. This developed my taste for horror and scary stuff generally, and I’d pick up horror comics as I came across them, but my dedication to the horror film magazines, particularly the Warrens and Castle of Frankenstein, remained dominant. The erratic nature of non-mainstream distribution soon became apparent though—even those newsagents which carried a broad range of magazines wouldn’t carry every issue of any given imported title. Unlike UK magazines or comics you couldn’t place standing orders for imported titles because the shops themselves had little idea what might turn up. Smaller shops just had a spinner rack or two which they expected the wholesaler to keep stocked – these generally only carried the worst imitations of the Warren magazines and the cheapest remaindered comics but once in a while you might get lucky….

….Obtaining every issue of something meant cycling round a whole circuit of shops.  And then suddenly in 1970 they vanished—you couldn’t find new horror film magazines anywhere in North East London.   I guessed there’d been some kind of official crackdown.  Only years later did I realise that the horror film mags had ceased being distributed at exactly the same time as the Warren etc horror comics – ie following the Miller raid and prosecution.  (There was a bit of crossover between the two – Warren had tested the waters for Creepy and Eerie by publishing comic stories in its horror film titles, and some of its competitors followed suit). I’m not sure that L Miller actually distributed the Warren magazines – I think that was Thorpe and Porter – but neither company would have forgotten the climate of the debate when the 1955 Act had been passed, and the 1970 prosecution evidently had the ‘chilling effect’ desired…..”

In contrast to the voluminous amounts of US material sporadically available, very few dedicated British horror film magazines were ever produced.  Prior to the 1970s, just three professionally-published UK titles appeared. and all are now of considerable historical interest.  The first—Screen Chills and Macabre Stories—is a major landmark in its own right, as it almost certainly predates FM.  Only its publisher—Pep Pubs of Croydon—is listed inside, though its editor is now thought to have been Leslie Syddall.  Despite being undated, most authorities place Screen Chills as appearing in Nov 1957 due to the contents: two ‘new’ films are fictionalised—I Was a Teenage Werewolf and Dead That Walk (released in Aug and Oct respectively)—while a single-page feature ‘Coming Your Way’ details eight further upcoming releases (Voodoo Island, Daughter of Dr Jekyll, 20 Million Miles to Earth, The Disembodied, The Giant Claw, Invasion of the Hell Creatures, plus a reissue double-bill of Return of the Vampire / The Black Room), ALL of which appeared over Oct/Nov.   So it seems we contrived to beat the Yanks.  Hoorah!

The other two 60s titles were Certificate X! : Famous Filmland Monsters (spot the inspiration), published in Jan 1965 by World Distributors of Manchester—once again this was a one-shot, anonymously edited by Robin Bean (later to compile the four US issues of Shriek! magazine 1965-67, and later still edit the marginally more prestigious Films and Filming 1968-80)—plus Tim Stout’s Supernatural Horror Filming, which actually managed TWO (Hammer-based) issues in 1969, courtesy of Dorset Publications of Bournemouth.  And that was it.

In contrast the 70s saw a celebrated quartet of overlapping (and comparatively long-lived) titles:

1)  1973-75  Monster Mag  Ed. Roger Cook / Pub. Top Sellers (17 issues)

2)  1974-75  World of Horror  Ed. Jim Shier / Pub. Dallruth (9 issues)

3)  1975-76  Legend Horror Classics  Ed. Jim Shier / Pub. Legend Pubs (12 issues)

4)  1976-78  House of Hammer  Ed. Dez Skinn / Pub. General Book Dist. (23 issues)

….all of these are (once again) well-documented elsewhere, and should hopefully require no further comment.

On another, even more esoteric level, there are of course fanzines – amateur pamphlets / newsletters cheaply duplicated by enthusiastic fans.  In terms of the UK’s output these remain almost totally undocumented, though about ten dedicated titles had appeared (then typically swiftly disappeared again) before the end of the 1960s.  The breakthrough year here is 1965, when a coherent network of Brit-Horror fandom is unmistakeably beginning to emerge – pioneer Gary Parfitt organised the UK’s first (chaotic) Horror Film Convention in Bath’s Royal Oak Inn, Widcombe, 23-25 Sept 1966.  Evaluating these things half a century later is challenging however, as so few copies have actually survived.

Practically all the titles involved were home-duplicated (‘ditto’ in the jargon of the time) in minuscule numbers and the handful that later ambitiously attempted to upgrade to litho (via jobbing local printers) quickly scuppered themselves financially as the upfront costs proved unsustainable given the then still very limited readership / lack of any established distribution network.  Still, as noted about ten titles (managing at least two issues each) appeared before the end of the 60s – the first six are patchily documented, but the latter four remain quite incredibly obscure:

1)  Horror Film Club of Great Britain   April 1964 – Sept 1966     Nine issues    Gary Parfitt    Bath

2)  Insight (‘for Devotees of the Macabre’)  Jan-March 1965   Two issues   Henry Simmons & Jeremy Pender    London (Battersea)

3)  Gothique  July 1965 – Oct 1969   Nine issues    David Griffiths & Stan Nicholls    London  (St Johns Wood)

4)  The Films of Bela Lugosi / Boris Karloff / Lon Chaney Jr  [‘Movie Thrills‘ one-shots]  1965/66  Harold Jordan   Glasgow

5)  Twylight   Feb 1967 – Feb 1968   Two issues   Michael Harris    Rainham

6)   L’Incroyable Cinema   April 1969 – Sept 1971   Five issues    Harry Nadler & Charles Partington    Salford

7)  Monster’s Mirror   Three issues?  1967-69    Martin Dawber   Wigan

8)  Shades of Evil   Four issues?  1968-69    David Fletcher   Bradford

9)  Scream   Five issues?  1969-70    Keith Walker & David Sutton   Birmingham

10)  Masque   Four issues?   1969-71    Bill Barradell   Leicester

Aside from the editors themselves, prolific early contributors include John Ramsey Campbell (then still using his Christian name) and Alan Dodd (1934-2001) the reclusive ‘Hermit of Hoddesdon’, belatedly emerging as a key connecting-thread and involved somehow in practically every title listed above.

 

So, having sketched-in the scurrilous magazine-prehistory, what about the later books that gradually transformed horror films into a respectable academic topic?  We had better start by first defining our terms and outlining some parameters (always a lot of fun you have to agree). What do we mean by ‘book’, what do we mean by ‘horror film’, what time-frame are we imposing, and what material do we propose to deliberately exclude?  Let’s take things a step at a time.

A book is a commercially-printed publication featuring at least 100 pages and an ISBN (first introduced in 1967, fact-fans).  A horror film is a trickier concept, which we could easily spend many hours going in circles with.  For our purposes it can be loosely described as a film whose chief aim is to frighten, predominantly via the dramatic presentation of supernatural or fantasy themes, or sometimes a deliberately stylised approach to the bizarre / abnormal. Anything failing to meet these rough criteria probably isn’t a horror film (it’s most likely a thriller) and if you don’t agree go away and write your own essay.

In terms of a time-frame, the obvious cut-off is 1979.  Home video was then only just emerging, and the ONLY way to see these films was either at the cinema itself (where reissues were still popular) or on television (where themed film-seasons were still a staple). The key issue here is really ACCESSIBILITY, which was then vastly more limited. Many of the older films discussed had not actually been seen by their chroniclers for years (if at all) and several had developed semi-mythical reputations as a result.  Volunteering any sort of critical opinion was often a case of either shooting in the dark or relying on other people’s earlier assertions.  A related theme is access to historical data itself—most early horror film books are riddled with factual errors for the simple reason that their authors had no easy way of fact-checking.  Cinema history (particularly populist history) was then still in the process of being written, and reliable reference-sources were limited.  This accounts for the obsessive compiling of annotated film-checklists in many of the earlier books’ appendices, which would strike most modern readers as redundant.

Finally, what about exclusions?  As we are here principally concerned with broad historical surveys, studies that focus on either a specific individual (real or fictional) or particular film have been deliberately ignored.  So, no biogs or autobiogs, and no “Making Of …” type texts.  One handy pointer in this context is title-keywords: of the fifty or so books we’re about to discuss, all but a tiny handful contain either ‘horror’ or ‘monsters’ somewhere in their title. Some feature variants on ‘vampires’ or ‘fantasy’, and a few—if their authors insist on being REALLY avant-garde—call themselves things like Terrors of the Screen or Scream Gems. But (as illustrated below) 95% of our contributors dutifully play by the accepted rules: publishers generally prefer straightforward titles as these usually sell more books.

To distinguish nationality (a key theme) the following catalogue has been split into two (UK/US) sections.  To keep things simple only date / title / author / publisher are given here—further bibliographic details will be provided in the ensuing chronological discussion….

The Books: 1965-79

British:

1. 1967  ‘The Horror Film’  Ivan Butler  (Zwemmer)
2. 1969  ‘Movie Monsters’  Denis Gifford  (Studio Vista)
3. 1971  ‘Horror Film Album’  Allen Eyles  (Ian Allan)
4. 1973  ‘A Pictorial History of Horror Movies’  Denis Gifford  (Hamlyn)
5. 1973  ‘The House of Horror’  Allen Eyles  (Lorrimer)
6. 1973  ‘A Heritage of Horror’  David Pirie  (Gordon Fraser)
7. 1974  ‘Movie Treasury of Horror Movies’  Alan Frank  (Octopus)
8. 1974  ‘Cinefantastic—Beyond the Dream Machine’  David Annan  (Lorrimer)
9. 1974  ‘Horror and Fantasy in the Cinema’  Tom Hutchinson  (Studio Vista)
10. 1975  ‘Ape—Kingdom of Kong’  David Annan  (Lorrimer)
11. 1975  ‘Seal of Dracula’  Barrie Pattison  (Lorrimer)
12. 1975  ‘Cinema of Mystery’ (Poe)  Rose London  (Lorrimer)
13. 1976  ‘Zombie—the Living Dead’  Rose London  (Lorrimer)
14. 1976  ‘The Horror People’  John Brosnan  (MacDonald & Janes)
15. 1976  ‘Monsters and Vampires’  Alan Frank  (Octopus)
16. 1977  ‘The Vampire Cinema’  David Pirie  (Hamlyn)
17. 1977  ‘Horror Films’  Alan Frank  (Hamlyn)
18. 1977  ‘Monsters of the Movies’  Denis Gifford  (Carousel)

American:

1. 1965  ‘Monsters Maidens and Mayhem’  Brad Steiger  (Merit)
2. 1965  ‘Master Movie Monsters’  Brad Steiger  (Merit)
3. 1966  ‘Horror!’  Drake Douglas  (Macmillan)
4. 1967  ‘Illustrated History of the Horror Film’  Carlos Clarens  (Putnam)
5. 1970  ‘Terrors of the Screen’  Frank Manchel  (Prentice-Hall)
6. 1972   ‘Monsters from the Movies’  Thomas Aylesworth  (Lippincott)
7. 1972   ‘Focus on the Horror Film’  Roy Huss  (Prentice-Hall)
8. 1972   ‘Cinema of the Fantastic’  Chris Steinbrunner  (Saturday Review)
9. 1973   ‘Karloff and Company: the Horror Film ‘  Robert Moss  (Pyramid)
10. 1973   ‘Great Monsters of the Movies’  Edward Edelson  (Doubleday)
11. 1974   ‘Great Horror Movies’  Favius Friedman  (Scholastic)
12. 1974   ‘Classics of the Horror Film’  William Everson  (Citadel)
13. 1975   ‘Heroes of the Horrors’  Calvin Beck  (Collier)
14. 1975   ‘Horrors From Screen to Scream’  Ed Naha  (Avon)
15. 1975   ‘The Vampire Film’  Alain Silver  (Barnes)
16. 1975   ‘Living in Fear’  Les Daniels  (Scribner)
17. 1976   ‘Horror Films’  Richard Dillard  (Simon & Schuster)
18. 1976   ‘The Horror Factory’  Bruce Dettman  (Gordon)
19. 1977   ‘Scream Gems’  Mark Baraket  (Drake)
20. 1977  ‘Rise and Fall of the Horror Film’  David Soren  (Lucas)
21. 1977   ‘Fabulous Fantasy Films’  Jeff Rovin  (Barnes)
22. 1977   ‘Dark Dreams’  Charles Derry  (Barnes)
23. 1977   ‘Great Monsters of the Movies’  Robert Davidson  (Pyramid)
24. 1978   Classic Movie Monsters’  Donald Glut  (Scarecrow)
25. 1979   ‘Celluloid Vampires’  Michael Murphy  (Pierian)
26. 1979   ‘Forgotten Horrors’  George Turner  (Barnes)

Examining these titles individually (and in chronological order of appearance):

1)  STEIGER  Monsters Maidens and Mayhem—A Pictorial History of Hollywood Film Monsters  (126pp)

Technically speaking, the very first dedicated horror film books to appear were a trio of pocket-sized reprints from Famous Monsters of Filmland—Best from FM, Son of FM (both 1964), and FM Strike Back! (1965)—all published by Paperback Library Inc.  But since these contain no original content (beyond Ackerman’s trademark pun-filled introductory editorials) they require no further comment.

The first ORIGINAL book was a similar small-format pocket paperback, which nevertheless took pains to distance itself from the deliberately juvenile competition.  A spoof warning-notice opposite the Contents page reads: “BEWARE all ye who enter these pages.  By so doing, you forsake the unfunny captions and awkward self-kidding never absent in writing of a similar orientation.  Steel yourself for a thoroughly fascinating but serious discussion, handled without the tedious frills and fripperies less dedicated monster-lovers seem to cherish. FOREWARNED IS FOREARMED!”  This might carry greater conviction if more than a scant 46 of the book’s 126 pages actually offer the Serious Discussion promised (the remainder feature wall-to-wall photos), and the whole thing can easily be got through in about fifteen minutes flat.  But despite this, it IS the first book of its type, and it IS a clear advance on Famous Monsters & co.

Author Steiger (1936-2018—real name Eugene Olson) was an English teacher from Iowa turned professional writer, who churned out scores of offbeat paperbacks discussing his favourite subjects of the Paranormal (chiefly cryptozoology and UFOs) and Hollywood (chiefly star-biogs) over almost fifty years.  He had a fluent, down to earth writing style, featuring a sharp eye for the telling detail and a dry taste for the occasional deadpan gag.  Monsters Maidens and Mayhem has nine (very) brief chapters—In the Beginnings / Man-Made Monsters and Monstrous Men / Vampires / Werewolves / Mummies / King-Size Creeps and Super-Science Horrors / Boris Karloff—Mr Monster / AIP and the House of Poe / Shapes of Things to Come—tersely covering all the major themes, with occasional titbits of behind-the-scenes detail (Karloff’s makeup, King Kong’s effects etc).  The final chapter notes that “64-65 marks the year of the monster on television” name-checking The Outer Limits, The Addams Family, The Munsters and Bewitched, implicitly suggesting the genre was aimlessly drifting into light-hearted pastiche (George Romero was still shooting beer commercials for TV at this point).

2)  STEIGER  Master Movie Monsters  (126pp)

Monsters Maidens and Mayhem was such an immediate success Steiger’s publishers swiftly ordered a carbon-copy follow-up, and the author readily obliged just a couple of months later. Master Movie Monsters is the mix as before (though with an opportunist price-hike from 60c to 75c), featuring seven chapters and a brief autobiographical Foreword in which Steiger argues passionately (and intelligently) that—despite regular claims to the contrary—his topic is eminently suitable for children.  The ensuing headings are: Nightmares From the Nickleodeon [silents] / Fantasy’s Finest Hour [Universal] / Boris and Bela—High Priests of Monsterdom [featuring a full Karloff filmography] / Vintage Vampires / Werewolves—Families That Prey Together Stay Together / Mad Scientists and What They Hath Wrought / The New Demonology.

The final chapter, attempting to assess the current scene and where it is headed, is particularly interesting.  Steiger opens by discussing the previous year’s Fractured Flickers controversy (in which Lon Chaney Jr had made headlines by bitterly attacking a ‘disrespectful’ TV spoof of his father’s Hunchback of Notre Dame), pointing out that anyone who had willingly appeared alongside Abbott and Costello was hardly in a position to complain.  He then analyses a couple of hot-off-the-press Variety interviews with Jimmy Carreras (talking about Hammer’s future plans), and Vincent Price (talking about AIP’s positive critical reception in Europe), before quoting a reflective piece from French director Robert Hossein (noting how Horror flourishes during ‘disturbed times’).  Steiger wraps matters up by enthusiastically discussing the latest British import—an offbeat TV series entitled Dr Who (airing on CBC from Jan 1965), including quotes from producer Verity Lambert and star William Hartnell.  His final paragraph, namechecking all these various individuals, suggests that the future of fantasy is clearly in safe hands.  This sort of positivity (and bang up to date reportage) remains fresh and appealing over half a century later.  Not all Steiger’s successors would take the same tack.

3)  DOUGLAS  Horror!  (309pp including Bibliography and Filmography

Horror! can be clearly identified as a transitional text—a weighty hardback from a respected publisher, with an accessibly light-hearted yet determinedly serious-minded approach.  Two factors mean it is nevertheless generally overlooked today: (i) it spends a LOT of time discussing the genre’s literary antecedents (a fresh angle then, but largely redundant now), and (ii) its author has cloaked himself in an alias so oblique his real identity is still in debate half a century later.

Dealing with the identity issue first, the dust-jacket states: “Drake Douglas is the pseudonym of a gentleman who has been deeply involved with horror throughout his life—and prefers to remain anonymous”—though the 1966 US Catalog of Copyright Entries gives his real name as Werner Zimmerman, a New Jersey journalist who was apparently guest-speaker at an Eastern Science Fiction Association meeting in Newark that year (and supposedly wrote the first-draft of his magnum opus as a teenager c.1948).  He also later penned a trio of pulp fantasy novels—Undertow, Creature, Death Song—under the same pseudonym in the mid-80s, and may possibly still be alive today.  All he would admit to in 1966 was that he hadn’t seen the Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera as “I was not yet born at the time”—the rest is a tantalising blank, which has done nothing to bolster his book’s long-term credibility.

Horror! has a similar basic format to Steiger’s original effort, though as noted the focus here is as much on the literary inspirations as the resulting films.  There are ten themed chapters: The Vampire / The Werewolf / The Monster / The Mummy / The Walking Dead / The Schizophrenic [Jekyll+Hyde] / The Phantom [of the Opera], plus three biographied ‘Creators of Horror’—Poe, Lovecraft and Machen.  The relevant novels and stories are synopsised (at often inordinate length), then the subsequent films more briefly critiqued.  The writing is lively and atmospheric, and if the prose (if frequently purple) likeably driven by the author’s unmistakeable enthusiasm.  Douglas’s taste is also notably independent-minded: he confidently labels the early Hammers as modern classics, being especially keen on the then-unloved Curse of the Werewolf “..one of the top-grade horror films… a considerable compliment to all concerned”.  He does slightly undermine himself later on though, tutting at AIPs Premature Burial: “The film presented a rather disturbing element however which had also marred the later Hammer productions—a rather uncomfortable emphasis on promiscuity”.  Oh, surely not Vicar.

Douglas’s book—when it is discussed at all—provokes heated dispute amongst contemporary fans.  Some recall it with affection as the first intelligent break from the frustratingly juvenile approach of Famous Monsters et al, while others aggressively deride it as sloppily error-packed rubbish (often pedantically cataloguing its occasional spelling mistakes, as though that proved anything).  It always seems to have had this oddly divisive effect: at the time of its original appearance both Russ Jones and Robert Bloch gave it utterly scathing, venomous reviews, and it is very difficult now to see what riled them so badly… unless of course they knew something about its elusive author that we don’t.  Either way, Horror! contrives to tread an engaging line between serious scholarship and approachable accessibility that some later efforts would struggle with.

4)  BUTLER  The Horror Film  (176pp including Filmography, Bibliography and Index)

1967 saw the publication of two rival texts, one British (Butler) and one American (Clarens), and it is of clear historical interest to establish which actually appeared first.  Clarens’ book (to be discussed in a moment) was published on 5th May, and while a few sources quote 1st Jan for Butler’s, this is simply a standard cataloguing-convention when the actual date is unknown. In his Introduction, Butler namechecks a handful of ‘serious’ (chiefly French) periodicals discussing horror, before asserting “There does not, however, appear to be any book in English which, while deprecating lurid sensationalism in the films themselves, also endeavours to avoid it in writing about them, and to deal seriously with a large and important aspect of the film as we know and respect it today”.  In other words, if Clarens DID precede Butler, he must have done so by such a narrow margin that news had still not crossed the Atlantic, and it seems safest to assume both books appeared practically simultaneously. For all its pioneering credentials, The Horror Film is physically the smallest book in our entire survey, being a dinky little 6¼” x 5¼” paperback, part of Zwemmer’s ‘International Film Guide’ series edited by Peter Cowie, which also took in volumes on Hitchcock (by Robin Wood), The Marx Brothers (by Allen Eyles), Welles, Keaton, the Musical, Animation, plus French and Swedish cinema, all in the same tiny format.

Butler (1909-98—born Edward Ivan Oakley Beuttler) was one of Britain’s most senior and respected film critics, originally an actor / playwright (ironically appearing in 1920s Rep productions of Dracula), who wrote over a dozen books on the history and mechanics of both theatre and cinema.  He is thus not a ‘fan’ per se, and instead writes about Horror dispassionately as a neglected genre worthy of intelligent analysis.  His Edwardian prose is stiff and rather wordy, and his distaste for ‘lurid sensationalism’—in a genre historically built upon it—often undermines the analysis.  In common with other early critics, Butler has difficulty accepting the fact that Horror Films, by definition, set out to Horrify, feeling this a distinctly cheap, unworthy effect.  In his appendix-filmography he briefly critiques The Fly (1958): “Included here on account of its notoriety, this is probably the most ludicrous, and certainly one of the most revolting, science-horror films ever perpetrated…. the film degenerates from the moment we see the insected man, plumbing lower and lower depths of inanity, and revelling in mere sadistic beastliness when his wife squashes his fly-head in a large press—an episode dwelt on with disgusting relish…”  His thoughts on the later Cronenberg remake are perhaps fortunately unrecorded.

As a genuine pioneer, Butler takes several interestingly novel approaches to the material.  He deliberately covers ALL films which contain horrific elements, even if these are either fleeting, incidental, or—in a few cases—based on actual (Nazi etc) atrocities.  His book is divided into ten chapters, followed by a long (50 page) Annotated Chronology of representative films (notable for its groundbreakingly broad international sweep).  Chapter-headings are: Horror Through the Ages / The Macabre in Silent Cinema / Dracula and Frankenstein / Three Early Sound Classics [Vampyr, Mamoulian’s Jekyll and Hyde, Freaks] /  British Horror / Two British Classics [Dead of Night, The Innocents] / Clouzet: Le Corbeau and Les Diaboliques / Hitchcock and Psycho / Roger Corman and Edgar Allan Poe / Polanski and Repulsion.  It can be immediately appreciated that Butler generally prefers psychological thrillers to the supernatural, which (if it MUST be deployed) should ideally take the form of a restrained ghost story.

His exasperation with Hammer is undisguised: “The lurid publicity with which many of [their films] have been launched understandably roused violent reaction against them, often justified.  Much worthless, perhaps even pernicious, rubbish emanates from their studios to take up valuable screen time.  It is not the intention here to examine it in any detail, any more than to deal with the equally damnable stream of even muddier water from America and (usually vilely dubbed) from Italy”.  Along with many of his contemporaries, Butler is instinctively inclined to give most time to those Hammers featuring proper Stars—ie fading US actresses of the Davis / Crawford / Bankhead generation—and dismiss Terence Fisher as a prolific but fundamentally untalented hack (he’s too polite to actually say this outright, and just sardonically implies it).  To try and be as fair as possible, he later concedes One Million Years BC is: “Thoroughly entertaining [and] has all the ingredients—admirable colour, imaginative photography, gusto and energy, a disarming sense of the sheer pleasure of movie-making—which can make Hammer horror films so enjoyable when they do not appear to indulge in nastiness for its own sake”.  But on the whole he prefers rhapsodising over Peeping Tom and Repulsion, where the nastiness clearly has an auteurist Get Out Of Jail Free card.

5)  CLARENS  An Illustrated History of the Horror Film  (256pp including annotated Filmography and Index)

As already noted, it seems likely that the appearance of the Butler and Clarens books was separated by no more than a couple of months, and the authors were blissfully unaware of each other’s efforts.  Clarens’ book now has by far the bigger reputation, partly because it naturally enjoyed a much wider early readership, and partly because it is considerably longer and more detailed.  But if Butler’s effort is a slightly austere academic read, Clarens’ is quite frankly a tediously verbose slog.  The current writer vividly recalls struggling through it as an enthusiastic young teenager, wondering what all the fuss was about.

To be quite fair, Clarens (1930-87—born Carlos Figueredo) was not writing in his native tongue.  Born in Havana, he studied architecture and languages in Paris before an obsession with film-making instead diverted him to work as a production assistant for Demy and Bresson. Moving to New York in 1956 he made his name as an avant-garde critic, while running a popular film-still rental business as a sideline.  He also occasionally worked as a subtitler, and was apparently fluent in five languages, though his English prose style is—to put it mildly—tortuously mannered.  Combined with frequently truculent, dismissive opinions, his criticism might best be described as a distinctly acquired taste.

His Illustrated History comprises nine overlapping chapters: The Wizard of Montreuil (France 1895-1913) / Doubles, Demons and the Devil Himself (Germany 1913-1932) / A Silent Conspiracy of Terror (America 1900-1928) / Children of the Night (Hollywood 1928-1947) / The Dead Next Door [Vampyr] / Horror, the Soul of the Plot [Lewton] / ‘Keep Watching the Sky!’ [sci-fi] / Horror Around the World [England, Italy, Mexico] / No End Title [more sci-fi].  The book’s most striking quality (once the reader has adjusted to the clunky prose) is its remorseless negativity.  Clarens doesn’t really seem to LIKE horror films very much, or—perhaps more precisely—can’t resist being continually rude about them.  Very little meets his unqualified approval, as (from late-period Universal onwards) virtually all candidates wither under his archly disappointed gaze.  His speciality is the terse three-line plot summary followed by an acidic put-down.  After a while, you begin to wonder why he’s bothering. Almost half his ‘Horror Around the World’ chapter covers modern US film-makers (Castle, Cohen, Corman), with Hammer curtly dismissed as pedestrian and the Italians as crude sensationalists.  Deliberate subtlety scarcely fares any better though, since Dead of Night is apparently pretentious and The Innocents banal.  He at least demonstrates some filial affinity for the emerging Mexican output (though doesn’t feel it deserves more than a page and a half of coverage), while other countries apparently don’t exist at all.  Compared with this, Butler emerges as a committed (and warmly generous-spirited) Internationalist.

6)  GIFFORD  Movie Monsters  (160pp including themed Filmography)

Denis Gifford (1927-2000) should need no introduction to anyone interested in C20th British popular culture, since—particularly in the fields of cinema, TV, radio and children’s comics—he was by far its most dedicated and meticulous chronicler / historian.  His literary style is another matter, and he is now valued more for his landmark Catalogues and associated research than the string of cheerfully populist bestsellers he churned out over the 1970s.  He also unapologetically preferred older films and comics, disliking most post-1950s examples and supporting public criticism of IPC’s controversial new Action and 2000AD titles over 1976-77 for instance.  All three of his horror film books are dedicated to his daughter Pandora, with the implicit suggestion that if the material contained within isn’t suitable for her, it isn’t suitable for anyone.

Movie Monsters is essentially a picture book in the Steiger mould (actually an unlikely instalment in Studio Vista’s highbrow art-history ‘Pictureback’ pocket-series, alongside works on Dada, Warhol, the Bauhaus and Blake), though also features its author’s trademark exhaustively-researched catalogue lists.  Contents are divided into three parts: (i) CREATION—The Monster and The Golem (ii)  RESUSCITATION—The Mummy and The Zombie and (iii) METAMORPHOSIS—The Vampire, The Werewolf, The Cat, The Ape, The Beast, The Brute, The Mutant and The Mask.  The minimal text is brisk and to the point, chiefly restricting itself to capsule plot-summaries, though Gifford can’t resist labelling Fisher a ‘very basic’ director and Hammer cynical purveyors of ‘disgusting detail’ along the way.  But his usual penchant for laboured Ronnie Barker-style wordplay and gaggy alliteration is here kept mercifully in check, and the closing (tiny-print) 14-page filmography—following the Contents’ format—is undeniably impressive.

7)  MANCHEL  Terrors of the Screen  (122pp including Bibliography and Index)

Terrors of the Screen is an oddity in several ways.  Author Manchel (b.1935) is a Detroit-born film and literature academic with a long teaching career (at the University of Vermont) and about sixteen resulting books to his credit.  Why he nevertheless opted to join the emerging pantheon of genre-historians by simply re-writing Clarens’ book badly is anyone’s guess.

For Manchel, horror films don’t exist.  What HE documents are TERROR films, and any mention of the H-word is strictly verboten (apart from the odd occasion when he runs out of synonyms).  He never attempts to explain this quirk, though—given his slavish replication of Clarens’ entire structure—the suspicion has to be that he was just trying to avoid being charged with obvious plagiarism.  Terrors of the Screen is composed of five chapters (plus a short epilogue): In the Early Days [France 1895-1913] / From Soul to Screen [Germany 1913-1928] / A Thousand Faces [America 1920-1928] / A Time of Kings [1929-1935] / Tradition [1936-1968] / Reflections.  Manchel sets out his stall from the very opening sentence: “This book is about the special terrors that film-makers create, from the earliest days of crude theatrical tricks to the current emphasis on brutality, sex and violence”.  So if you’re expecting him to like anything after Bride of Frankenstein, you’re going to be disappointed.  32 years of modern film-making are in fact briskly dismissed in just 17 pages.

Even this wouldn’t be so bad if the reader could believe Manchel had actually SEEN half the films he blithely rubbishes, but the unavoidable impression is that a lot of the time he’s just parroting Clarens.  When he talks about Curse of Frankenstein “revolting the viewer… emphasising detached limbs and eyeballs, half-robed women and lots of violence… sadistic scenes of blood and torture…” the instinctive reaction is that he’s making it up.  Elsewhere his opinions are dismayingly ignorant for a supposed film academic.  His single-paragraph (p.87) dismissal of Lon Chaney Jr’s entire career is shockingly mean-spirited (implying actors actively solicit type-casting, rather than become helplessly trapped by it), while his praise of Ray Harryhausen’s ‘imaginative’ effects-work on Creature From the Black Lagoon must have raised eyebrows even in 1970.  (Manchel notes the film nevertheless ‘did not catch on’, which undoubtedly explains its two immediate sequels).  The author closes his survey with a poignant moment from Planet of the Apes: “…as the bitter and lonely voyager holds the broken pieces of the Statue of Liberty in his hands, he warns us of the madness of our age and the dangers we may yet face”.  How very true.

There are in fact only two positive things to say about this mess: (i) Manchel’s prose is at least more readable than his inspiration Clarens (not difficult), and (ii) the baroque cartouche of a demon’s head reproduced above each chapter-title (courtesy of Johann Ulrich Krauss, c.1700) is a rather nice touch.  The rest is frankly best overlooked.

8)  EYLES  Horror Film Album  (52pp)

Although this slim offering theoretically fails one of our basic inclusion-criteria (being less than 100 pages long), it represents such a key development in the emerging British scene it can’t really be ignored—the first large-format (A4) picture book, offering four or five vivid (and sharply-reproduced) stills on every page, accompanied by editor Eyles’ low-key but authoritative text.  Horror was the second of three ‘Film Albums’ from publisher Ian Allan (#1 was Westerns and #3 Cary Grant, both advertised on the inner covers), illustrating the genre chronologically from 1919’s Caligari through to 1971’s “new Tigon release” Blood on Satan’s Claw.  Its clear influence on the later Gifford and Frank hardback-bestsellers is unmistakeable.

Eyles (b.1941) is probably one of Britain’s most under-rated film historians, writing and researching since the 60s, and editor of the respected Focus on Film magazine throughout its ten-year (1970-80) existence.  His thirty or so books cover everything from classic Hollywood to lost British films, with a recent series documenting the history of the major UK cinema chains—though he is probably still best-known for co-editing 1973’s landmark ‘House of Horror’ Hammer book (which we shall discuss shortly).  His crisp, fluently informative no-nonsense prose is consistently readable.

9)  AYLESWORTH  Monsters From the Movies  (160pp including Filmography and Index)

Aylesworth’s book is one of the most long-lived of our survey—reworked / retitled versions of it were still being published in the late-80s.  It is the first entry in our sequence aimed specifically at older children (being part of Lippincott’s ‘Weird and Horrible Library’ which also included Poltergeists by David Knight and Mummies by Georgess McHargue), and follows Douglas’s earlier tactic of discussing the mythical / literary inspirations in some depth. Aylesworth (1927-1995) graduated from Indiana University and started his career as a high-school tutor in Illinois, teaching science and writing before eventually becoming a senior editor at Doubleday 1964-80, specialising in Young Adult books.  He churned out more than a hundred such titles himself, covering everything from baseball to politics to the environment.

Monsters From the Movies has six chapters (plus a short Epilogue)—Come With Me to the Theater / Man Made Monsters / Self Made Monsters / The Human Fiend / Back From the Dead / Things From Another World—and alongside the usual stills of Boris and Bela also reproduces striking medieval woodcuts of various alchemists and demons etc.  The writing itself is somewhat uneven.  Aylesworth starts well—noting how difficult it is for cinema to convey the subtle psychological terrors of Poe and MR James—but by p.39 the cards are on the table: “With [The Curse of Frankenstein] a new day had dawned.  Hammer spent little time in developing characterizations, sympathy, or even suspense. The film seemed to concentrate on blood and guts with a little sex thrown in”—and we are being treated to the unique spectacle of Aylesworth parroting Manchel parroting Clarens.  His Epilogue isn’t bad though, suggesting that the most notable recent monster to appear onscreen is Hal from 2001, with sentient computers being the real emerging threat to mankind.  The book’s cover-illustration, featuring a lively cartoon-montage by Robert Quackenbush (crazy name, crazy guy) is also effective.

10)  HUSS  Focus on the Horror Film  (186pp including Filmography, Bibliography and Index)

This is another clear landmark—an academic collection of 25 separate essays which (almost for the first time) make the collective point that the genre is still evolving, and current developments are at least as important as historical ones.  In this context a short Chronology on p11-12 ends with two terse entries: “1968: Night of the Living Dead (USA)—Underground cult film on zombies, now emerging above ground. 1969: Death of Boris Karloff”.  The second paragraph of Ted Ross’s Introduction (discussing the emerging new wave of younger directors) is worth quoting in its entirety: “Thus, the latest (1971) film adaptation of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde—entitled I, Monster—was directed by 22-year-old Stephen Weeks.  Two recent entries in the Dracula sweepstakes, Countess Dracula and Taste the Blood of Dracula, were made by another director in his twenties presently working in England, Hungarian-born Peter Sasdy.  And an earlier group of even more astonishing horror films was completed by Michael Reeves shortly before his death in his mid-twenties.  His Witchfinder General and The Sorcerors mark a by now legendary achievement in the British terror-suspense cinema of the 60s”.  This is all a far cry from Clarens’ determined Pooterism, and indeed one contributor, Frank McConnell, goes so far as to describe An Illustrated History as a “complete, if pedestrian, survey of the genre”.  I’ll bet Carlos enjoyed that one.

Publisher Prentice-Hall’s “Film Focus” series appeared in 1972, twelve individual volumes discussing various specific aspects of cinema from Chaplin to Godard to Rashomon.  Horror’s joint-editors Roy Huss (1927-1983) and Ted Ross were both senior Professors of English (at Queens College and Fairleigh Dickinson respectively), and assembled some distinguished contributors, notably Curtis Harrington, Jack Kerouac, Raymond Durgnat, Lawrence Alloway and Ray Bradbury, whose essays are arranged under four themed headings: The Horror Domain / Gothic Horror / Monster Terror / Psychological Thriller.  The contents are inevitably uneven.  Some pieces are contemporary, some historical, some light-hearted and some painfully Intellectual.  Lawrence Alloway’s ‘Monster Films’ (reprinted from the Jan 1960 issue of Encounter magazine) is a shrewd appreciation of Hammer’s emerging impact, while Frank McConnell’s ‘Rough Beasts Slouching’ (from a 1970 Kenyon College Review journal) is—despite its enjoyable pop at Clarens—borderline unreadable.  (McConnell is one of those magisterial commentators whose sentences have to be read through at least twice to get any sense out of them).  Ernest Jones’s ‘On the Nightmare of Bloodsucking’ (a learned anthropological treatise on vampirism which would crop up again in later books) doesn’t actually mention horror films at all, while Raymond Durgnat’s ‘Eyes Without a Face’ is a typically brilliant, acerbic analysis of the horrified British press-reaction to Franju’s masterpiece. The three concluding essays deal with a trio of recent hits clearly pointing the way forward: Repusion, Rosemary’s Baby and Targets, all of which contribute to the sense of a new, more socially aware approach to the genre being road-tested.  It would be several years before anything comparably ambitious appeared.

(In a somewhat morbid postscript, co-editor Huss suffered by far the most macabre fate of any of our authors, vanishing in remote Sumatran jungle in Jan 1983 while on a research trip with colleague James Allen. The pair were last seen alive on 15^th getting directions from villagers about a short-cut through the forest after their hired-guide failed to turn up. There were subsequent conflicting reports that they had either been murdered en-route for their money or simply got lost and starved to death. An employee at their guest-house initially confessed to robbing and burying them in shallow graves, but later recanted when local police proved less than zealous in investigating the claims. The bodies were never recovered, and they were officially declared dead in New York in Sept 1987).

11)  STEINBRUNNER  Cinema of the Fantastic  (282pp)

Compared with the sweeping scope and intellectual ambition of Huss and Ross’s compendium, our next entry is deliberately straightforward.  Chris Steinbrunner (1934-1993) was a New York writer / broadcaster specialising in detective films and fiction, who had presented a popular college radio-show while studying at Fordham University and later became director of film programming at WOR-TV (where he was known as a devoted Sherlock Holmes buff).  His co-author Burt Goldblatt (1924-2006) was a Massachusetts graphic designer latterly best remembered for a string of classic 1950s-60s jazz LP sleeves.

Cinema of the Fantastic describes itself on the cover as “A fascinating excursion into the bizarre, satanic and haunting film world of the incredible”  It is composed of fifteen chapters, chronologically discussing fifteen landmark films: A Trip to the Moon / Metropolis / Freaks / King Kong / The Black Cat / The Bride of Frankenstein / Mad Love / Flash Gordon / Things to Come / The Thief of Bagdad / Beauty and the Beast / The Thing From Another World / Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea / Invasion of the Body Snatchers / Forbidden Planet.  It can be immediately seen that (barring the first two Silents) most of the films selected are American, and all fit into a tight 1932-56 time frame.  In other words the book makes no serious claim to be either a broad or groundbreaking survey, and is effectively just another populist entry in the early-70s US nostalgia-boom (though a likeably well-written and nicely illustrated one).  There is a single-page (four paragraph) Introductory Note that says absolutely nothing, and a closing single-page Epilogue which dutifully suggests 2001 is a major technological / conceptual breakthrough.  The quintessentially 1970s cover-design (with its chunky retro typeface and purple/orange colour scheme) is a delight.

12)  MOSS  Karloff and Company: The Horror Film  (158pp including Filmography, Bibliography and Index)

This refreshingly sharp little book was an entry in the prolific ‘Pyramid Illustrated History of the Movies’ series, running to over fifty individual instalments.  Most were on specific stars (hence the compromise title here), though a handful were similarly genre-based, including Gangsters, Musicals, Westerns and War films.  The author, Robert F Moss, is an oddly elusive figure, since he happens to share his name with two other popular contemporary writers, a cookery expert (speciality: the history of barbeques), and a born-again mystic (speciality: dream-teaching), and most online bibliographies mix up the three to frequently surreal effect.  OUR Moss gained a PhD at Columbia and went on to become an Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University, later publishing books on Chaplin, Kipling and Carol Reed amongst others.  He writes fluently and well with a likeably pragmatic approach, and (unlike some competitors) has clearly actually watched all the films he writes about.  In other words, although he isn’t too keen on Corman or Hammer, he can at least articulately explain why, and balance his criticism by acknowledging their good points.

Karloff and Company has eight chapters: Horror Films in the Silent Era / Karloff and Frankenstein / The Best of Karloff / Night Creatures / The Possessed and the Damned—Devils and Demons / Lady Killers / Things That Go Bump—The Ghostly Tales / Gothic Horror—Mr Price, Mr Poe, and Others.  One immediate objection is his redundant Lady Killers chapter, in which he wastes thirteen precious pages lengthily discussing Baby Jane and its immediate imitators, despite the fact that (even by his own Introductory definition) these aren’t horror films.  He is more than redeemed however by an engagingly level-headed outlook, and in this context it is worth quoting from his closing paragraph: “…Still, horror films are best approached as unportentously as possible.  On the one hand they should not be debased to a simple menagerie of scaly, puttied monsters, but, on the other, they should not be freighted with ponderous literary terminology and heavy, symbol-laden interpretations that are more appropriate to Kafka than Karloff.  The virtues of a good horror movie, like most genre films, are apt to be craftsmanship, technical expertise and style—not profundity, character development, or recognisable human experience.  Works of popular entertainment do not have the same goals as serious art, though occasionally they accomplish some of these goals in an incidental, almost unintentional way.  But then, as WH Auden has said, ‘A man need not apologise for moods in which he does not feel like reading the Divine Comedy….'”  Amen.

13)  GIFFORD  A Pictorial History of Horror Movies  (216pp including Appendices, Bibliography and Index)

Gifford’s Pictorial History is indisputably The Guvnor of British horror film books, remaining continuously in print for three solid decades following its original April 1973 appearance (it was reprinted a whopping FOUR TIMES in 1974 alone).  A large format demi-quarto (11½” x 9½”—only Alan Frank’s subsequent Horror Films was bigger), everything about it commands attention, from Tom Chantrell’s classic, lurid-green jacket design to its 350+ (mostly previously unseen) illustrations.  It became a bible for a generation of British fans, who—in the process of goggling at the eye-popping stills—would also inevitably absorb its fiercely reactionary historical viewpoint (although, as we shall see in a moment, the latter would be energetically challenged within months).  It probably sold more copies than all the other books in this survey put together.

Hamlyn published a series of popular large-format ‘Pictorial History’ cinema books over the early 70s including War, Crime, Westerns, Science Fiction, and, er, Sex in the Movies.  Their text was always authoritative, though (as the umbrella-heading clearly indicated) they were really all about the illustrations.  Gifford’s book comprises ten roughly chronological chapters—How Grand Was My Guignol / Dr Jekyll is Not Himself / The Clay Man Cometh—and Cometh Back / Lon Chaney Will Get You If You Don’t Watch Out! / Karloff and Lugosi, The Universal Monsters / The King of Kongs / A Chip Off the Old Hump / The Curse of the ‘B’ People / A Thing In Your Lap / The Best of British Blood—plus two typically forensic pages of Appendices (a complete ‘H’ Certificate checklist 1933-50, a comprehensive Super-8 ‘Collector’s Guide’, and two separate book and magazine Bibliographies).

The lasting impact of Gifford’s magnum opus deserves a measured analysis, though its deliberately light-hearted, ad-hoc style in fact tends to work against such a critique.  The writing is chatty, gag-filled, sometimes irritatingly smart-alec, favouring staccato short sentences to build up a rhythm.. You can’t fault Gifford’s expertise and enthusiasm, only regularly find yourself wishing he’d write a bit more calmly.  The short (single-page) autobiographical Introduction is interesting: “I wrote the history of horror films twenty years ago, but nobody wanted to know (until Carlos Clarens finally came through with the right book at the right time)….”  He also makes a decent stab at defining his subject matter: “For me, an element of fantasy is essential to the true horror film: the impossible rather than the improbable.  The vampire, the werewolf, the walking dead and the man-made monster—these are the heroes of horror films, not the Lodgers and the Rippers and the Hooded Terrors…”

This is all reasonable (and indeed largely mirrors the present writer’s outlook), but the problem is that Gifford automatically equates age with quality.  For him, Son of Frankenstein was “The first of the new horror films, the last of the great ones”.  He enjoys poking fun at the (largely tacky) contributions of the ’50s, but by the time we get to 1960 and AIP’s shift upmarket (with their new Poe series) he is clearly losing interest: Corman is a formula-bound hack and all his films look the same.  His closing chapter, The Best of British Blood, has since become notorious.  After lovingly cataloguing a lengthy sequence of incredibly obscure pre-war titles, we finally (p.204) get on to Hammer, who rate a single dismissive page before the book abruptly ends.  “In quantity Hammer films are fast approaching Universal, but in quality they have yet to reach Monogram.  Meanwhile they can admire their Queens Award for Industry and scream all the way to the bank”.  By 1973 this line just wouldn’t wash—sneering at declasse commercial success was one thing, but Hammer had recently (Oct 1971) enjoyed a major retrospective at the National Film Theatre, and a general critical re-assessment / recuperation was already well underway.  Not for Gifford though, who instead sentimentally closes with a long elegiac quote from Lon Chaney Jr—“Of the old monsters, only Chaney remains”—gloomily moaning how it’s all been downhill since Abbott and Costello.  With unfortunate (not to say cruel) timing, his embittered hero finally drank himself to death a mere three months later.

END OF PART 1

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