30) PIRIE The Vampire Cinema (176pp including Bibliography and Index)
Pirie’s long-awaited follow-up to his landmark A Heritage of Horror rather conservatively follows in the (then very recent) footsteps of Pattison and Silver, and—while unsurprisingly offering an incisively fresh approach—nevertheless covers fairly familiar ground, leaving fans hoping for another groundbreaking polemic perhaps slightly disappointed. To be quite fair however, in making the leap to a major (Hamlyn) publisher, Pirie would have had to offer a reasonably commercial topic, and (like the bestselling Gifford and Frank picture-books it followed) The Vampire Cinema is chockful of provocative stills featuring various female vampires in various states of undress. In his Introduction, Pirie flatly meets this angle head-on: “There would seem to be strong grounds for linking the [new] decline in vampire movies with the recent mushrooming of hardcore and softcore sexploitation. There has never been any doubt that the primary appeal of the films lay in their latent erotic content… It remains to be seen whether the graphic portrayal of sexuality on the screen can ever finally have the same suggestive power as the oral-sadistic metaphor it replaces… [But] in the meantime it is perhaps possible for the first time to chart the passage of the movie vampire with something like a sense of completeness. There will undoubtedly be more films, but the sense of an epidemic has utterly vanished.” The endlessly-updated new editions of Silver’s rival effort might seem to suggest otherwise.
The Vampire Cinema comprises seven chapters: The Vampire in Legend and Literature / Origins of the Vampire Movie / The Universal Vampire / The British Vampire / The Sex-Vampire / The New American Vampire / The Latin Vampire. In order to provide the requisite number of tits and bums, the Gallic contribution is forgrounded (Rollin Rollin Rollin, keep those nude vampires Rollin), while in his Conclusion, Pirie bemoans the commercial failure of such latterday cult favourites as Willard Huyck’s Messiah of Evil: “… a brilliant movie which exceeds virtually every other Gothic horror film since the war in terms of narrative ingenuity [and yet] has had no release whatsoever since its screening out of competition at the Cannes festival of 1974… if a vampire movie like this cannot obtain distribution, then it is hard to see how the form has any real possibility of development.” Hmm, good point. Hey, wait, I know—how about angsty TEENAGE vampires……?
31) FRANK Horror Films (189pp including Appendix, Bibliography and Index)
A mere three months after publishing The Vampire Cinema, Hamlyn followed it up with a blockbuster clearly intended to be The Daddy of British horror movie books, at least in terms of sheer physical size. Horror Films is easily the largest of the 70s pictorial hardbacks, being an whopping Royal Quarto (12¾” x 9¼”) and heavy enough as a result to be awkward to peruse unless propped open on a table (or the reader’s stomach). In this respect it rather resembles a medieval grimoire, and everything about it deliberately compels attention from its bold 3D-style title to the quite unforgettable cover-still of Peter Cushing and Shane Briant carefully sawing the top of Charles Lloyd-Pack’s head off. The (unusually lengthy) cover-blurb malevolently invites the quivering reader inside: “You thrilled to Frankenstein and Dracula. You cowered from the Mummy. You cringed at the Werewolf. See them erupt once more from the Tombs of Terror to chill you and thrill you in a monstrous compendium of Horror. Foreword by Terence Fisher”. Well, if that didn’t grab ya nothing would, and all over the country a generation of gawping schoolkids began feverishly saving up their pocket-money to accumulate the eye-watering £3.95 price tag.
Newly defected from Octopus, Frank follows a standard chronological approach to the (now-familiar) material, this time taking a decade-by-decade angle, opening each chapter with a two-page ‘Decade Review’ summary before launching into the heavily-illustrated highlights. The six chapter-headings are an enjoyable selection of advertising taglines: Relish For the Palate of a Jaded Public! [1895-1929] / Startling! Staggering! Sensational! [30s] / You Won’t Believe It… But It’s True! [40s] / See It With Someone Brave! [50s] / Thank God It’s Only a Motion Picture!!! [60s] / Blood!!! Everyone’s Blood!!! [70s]. There is also an intensively-researched ‘Title Changes’ Appendix, featuring American to British and vice versa (for both domestic and foreign-language imports) plus an illuminating Release title / Shooting title comparison-table.
This scholarly Appendix is really the book’s only concession to Academia, since both Fisher’s affable Foreword and Frank’s subsequent Introduction cheerfully stress the deliberately non-intellectual approach deployed. Fisher: “For all those who love film as an interpretive art form, and in particular appreciate the fantasy of horror films as I do, this book will prove to be fascinating… Alan Frank approaches his subject with wide knowledge, enthusiasm and critical interest. He never forgets that he is dealing with film as entertainment, which consequently must capture the viewers’ emotions as well as their intellect… The best horror films are adult fairy tales, no more and no less…” Frank himself then reinforces the point: “Films are there to entertain, so I have deliberately tried not to go too deep into the psychology and iconography behind horror films. This sort of approach, like too slavish an obsession with the auteur theory, can finally render discussion of films a sterile and depressing occupation and many films have perished under the dissective techniques of a too-intellectual approach to what is still the richest art form devised by man…”
One notable point about Horror Films is that it was the first British book to discuss the genre’s latest success de scandale, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, finally screened in the UK in Nov 1976 (Dillard had briefly covered it the previous year in his chapter on Night of the Living Dead, citing it in support of his general thesis that the genre was progressively dehumanising its protagonists). The level-headed (and historically aware) Frank might have been expected to take a cautiously neutral line, but even for him Hooper’s visceral epic is clearly A Bridge Too Far. His ‘Current Review: 1970-76’ summary grumbles: “…Film-makers tested the limits of audience acceptability and good taste, and exploitation movies were taken up by major critics, culminating in the lauding of the unpleasant The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Death Weekend. The 1970s were marked by a recession of good taste, and the critically attacked Hammer Horrors of the 50s seemed a long way off in these liberal times.” Elsewhere he flatly describes the film as ‘repellent’, though appears at least as irritated by its shallow fashionability as actual content. This is an interesting theme that will pop up again shortly.
32) GIFFORD Monsters of the Movies (95pp)
Britain’s last horror film book of the 70s was a straightforward slimline children’s paperback, sold (like Friedman’s earlier effort) via UK classroom Book Clubs for the very affordable sum of 45p. It might thus seem rather insignificant, but in fact—achieving widespread targetted distribution, boasting an eye-catchingly colourful cover, and being packed with exciting stills—must have turned a significant chunk of the nation’s younger (ie Primary-school age) bookworms into budding monster fans. The author’s name would have later led them on to his more substantial Pictorial History, and from there into teenage fandom and beyond. The present writer’s school-diary entry for Saturday 4th March 1978 breathlessly reports the following: “Gran took me to Birmingham to look in the shops… We had a cup of tea and a cob in a cafe, then took a look in WHSmiths. Gran bought me a book called ‘Monsters of the Movies’, it’s brilliant with a photo of a monster on every page, some even have a two-page spread! It’s got all the famous film monsters in alphabetical order and a few not so well known ones. We got home at one o’ clock and I had dinner then read it all afternoon.”
It only remains to add that Monsters of the Movies features a basic A-Z of 45 classic monsters from The Alligator People to The Zombie (1966 Hammer-style), each (as noted) accorded a two-page spread with the accompanying text being a brief but lively synopsis of the relevant film’s plot (told quite straight—Gifford here avoids his usual gaggy wordplay). Any self-respecting ten year old would have lapped this up, and many undoubtedly did.
33) BARAKET Scream Gems—Featuring All the Outstanding Gory Films in Movie History (143pp)
By this point in our survey (a full twelve years after Steiger’s pioneering efforts), cheap horror film picture books were clearly starting to be viewed by publishers as a reliable lowbrow moneyspinner, and as a consequence some of our later authors become very obscure indeed. Baraket has his own Facebook page stating “I am a Cinephile, wrote my first book on cinema at 21 and am interested in Classic film as a study, collection and a passion”. He was thus probably born c.1954, and may possibly be the same Mark Baraket who played Dr Aram Ross in the TV series Starship Antyllus (2015)—though then again he may not. Despite the reference to “my first book”, bibliographic sources list Scream Gems as his only published work.
Scream Gems’s back cover brashly advertises “MORE BOOKS ON ENTERTAINMENT” from publishers Drake, including From Jules Verne to Star Trek (by Jeff Rovin, shortly to appear in his own right), Illustrated Soap Opera Companion, The Quotations of WC Fields, Rock Gold, and TV Superstars (The Fonz, Starsky and Hutch, Charlie’s Angels, Laverne and Shirley). The book thus takes its place in this distinguished line-up as a cheapo speculative one-shot for easily distracted teens, although Baraket does make an Introductory effort to suggest a genuine USP: “I have assembled my favorite horror, science fiction, and fantasy films and have further divided the genres into specific classes to compare [them] with each other. The book is unique in that major motion pictures are described in the text, while most of the stills are from rare and contemporary films not found in similar works on the subject. If I have offended anyone by omitting favorite stills or films I am sorry. I have included films that many fans, buffs and collectors may not be aware of. I hope that you will find the book both entertaining and unusual—I have tried to make it so”. He succeeds, though the presentation is slipshod at best. The writing is what you would expect of a bubblingly keen amateur in their early 20s (ie frequently rambling and incoherent), and the stills are regularly miscredited (and sometimes not credited at all). Shots from The Lost World and Giant Behemoth are reverse-captioned (despite The Lost World having its title clearly inked on the still itself), Matango Fungus of Terror is described as The Eye Creatures, and we get a snap from something confidently labelled Blood on Satan’s Claw which isn’t. But to be quite fair (as Baraket suggests), most of the illustrations ARE new, with an interesting selection from previously overlooked Mexican and Philippino horrors.
There are thirteen (completely random) chapters: Nocturnal Creatures / And Man-Made / Celluloid Horrors / Mad Doctors, Mad Scientists and Heavies / That Old Black Magic / Three Classic Horror Films [1925 Phantom, 1923 Hunchback, 1932 Jekyll & Hyde] / Ghosts and Hauntings / Assorted Tales of Terror / To Earth and Beyond / Future Shock and Destruction / Magical Journeys via Celluloid / Diabolism in Fantasy Cinema / Fantasy Heroes and Heroines. One pleasant formatting quirk is that while the book’s right-hand pages generally feature a large still, those on the left share their text with a series of thirteen tall (full-height, left-margin) themed line-drawings by popular New York illustrator Ted Enik, which (being both elegant and witty) contrive to give Scream Gems a rather classier feel than it really deserves. But Baraket’s gauche enthusiasm is certainly preferable to the jaundiced moaning of some of his immediate contemporaries, and the vivid cover-still (from Metropolis) is a strikingly original choice.
34) SOREN The Rise and Fall of the Horror Film (103pp including Bibliography and Index)
One interesting distinction between our early British and American authors is that none of the Brits are self-conscious Intellectuals—the closest candidate we have in this regard is probably David Pirie, who, for all his academic rigour, is deliberately accessible and unpretentious. With the musings of RHW Dillard however we have already encountered weighty Significance, and the similar appearance in the field of Dr David Soren (b.1946, BA, MA PhD) only develops this trend. Lest anyone should doubt the importance of Dr Soren’s day job, an astonishingly detailed and self-congratulatory three-page CV is included at the end of the book detailing his various eminent archaeological investigations and resulting journal articles, films and exhibitions (Permanent and Temporary), TV appearances etc etc. Quite how any of this is relevant to an earnest discussion of The Giant Spider Invasion and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, the suitably dazzled reader must decide for themselves.
Rise and Fall… is now something of a cult text, first published by small-press outfit Lucas Brothers of Columbia MO (with the clarifying subtitle ‘An Art Historical Approach to Fantasy Cinema’) in 1977, whereupon it rapidly vanished into obscurity until reprinted by Gary Svelha’s Midnight Marquee Press in 1995 (then again in 2002 and 2009, each time with a different cover though now minus its original subtitle). Svelha’s 1995 Publisher’s Introduction tersely summarises the reason for its revival: “Even though the book was written and published in 1977… an extensive rewrite wasn’t [felt] necessary [as] so many observations made almost two decades ago are still very true today… Thus, when reading Soren’s reflections on why he feels films of the current decades pale [in comparison] to the classics of the past, remember Soren was writing in the era before horror/fantasy film criticism became so widespread…” If this sounds slightly disingenuous, that’s because it is. In fact all Soren effectively does here is rewrite Everson’s Classics of the Horror Film with a large Mortar Board perched precariously on his sorrowfully shaking head.
The author’s 1977 Introduction immediately lays its cards on the table: “Early in 1976 I went to the Columbia Missouri preview of a film entitled Carrie. Some 85 minutes later I left the theater somewhat nauseated and very much shocked. What a sad state of affairs it was when a fine director such as Brian De Palma could produce such senseless, stomach-turning violence. Was it necessary for John Travolta to strike a helpless pig on the head with a sledgehammer? Were the scenes of peepshow sex and extremely foul language good for anything but exploitation? Has the horror film become nothing more than a genre to titillate and then brutalize the emotions? How did all this come to pass?” If the reader hasn’t already burst into tears, the answers to these important questions are respectively No, No, Yes, and Because Of That Awful George Romero.
It is admittedly very easy (and frankly endlessly tempting) to make fun of Soren’s perpetual hand-wringing, but his appalled distaste is ultimately a quite unnecessary distraction from some frequently insightful and well-informed discussion of the art-history context to early (pre-War) Horror. But however good the latter often is, it is nevertheless continually undermined by the ultra-conservative world-view that transparently underpins it. Soren’s speciality is the pointed rhetorical question and he clearly believes everything he reads in the papers since—at least in his world—horror films have (from the late ’60s onwards) apparently been causing all sorts of real-life mayhem: “…But what effect do such [vigilante] films have on children and impressionable adults? How dangerous is a film like Pink Flamingos (1974) with girls getting kidnapped and made pregnant, then sold to lesbian couples to finance an inner-city heroin ring catering to high-school kids?” The answer clearly is Very Dangerous Indeed, and it is often difficult to believe Soren isn’t just indulging in a razor-sharp parody of po-faced moral panic.
Rise and Fall… contains ten chapters: Paris Magic / The Other Paris and Germany / The American Horror Film / Jean Vigo and Jean Cocteau / The Dreyer Dialectic / America in the Forties / Nuclear Horrors / The Successors of Melies / Hammer and the Threat of Television / Violence. The final chapter is best completely ignored (other than by connoisseurs of inadvertent high camp), and is solely notable as the first serious US discussion (“awful acting and bad dubbing” aside) of the output of a certain Dario Argento.
35) ROVIN The Fabulous Fantasy Films (271pp including Filmography, Appendices and Index)
According to the inside-jacket blurb, The Fabulous Fantasy Films represents “the first complete history of the genre from the silent Nosferatu and Cabinet of Dr Caligari to the current Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger”, and is furthermore “an invaluable companion to Film Fantasy Scrapbook by Ray Harryhausen, also published by AS Barnes & Co”. Having likewise printed Silver’s The Vampire Film two years earlier, Barnes were thus rapidly emerging as THE dedicated US genre-publisher of the 70s, similar to Britain’s Hamlyn. Author Rovin meanwhile was the (hugely prolific) New Kid on the horror Block, born in 1951 and entering NYU’s film school in 1969. Following two “disappointing” years there he left to work for various publishing companies, finally becoming a freelance writer in 1974 (editing Seaboard’s short-lived ‘Movie Monsters’ magazine 1974-75). Four decades on he has literally scores of books (both fiction and non-fiction) to his name, all predominantly Horror/Fantasy/SF-themed, though he has also recently been specialising in fashionable military/political thrillers. He gained some brief notoriety in 2016 when (at the climax of the Trump-Clinton presidential race), he gave a sensational interview claiming to have been the Clintons’ chief Fixer, employed (clearly unsuccessfully) to bury various unsavoury family scandals which—just two weeks before election-day—he suddenly felt morally obliged to share with the Nation via a couple of right-wing media outlets. How very edifying.
Returning to the matter in hand, Fabulous Fantasy Films is a chunky double-column read, breezily conversational in tone, with an impressive mix of films covered via literate plot-summaries, interesting snippets of behind-the-scenes detail and throwaway one-or-two line critiques. There’s nothing especially controversial, and indeed Rovin’s critical judgement is notably fair and balanced, though he REALLY doesn’t like The Exorcist, which he scathingly describes as a “shard of excrement” (a nuanced assessment also deployed by Dettman the previous year), although—as with Frank’s contemporary distaste for Texas Chainsaw Massacre—you sense that the film’s general fawning acclaim has just got on his nerves. His Introductory definition of Fantasy is also dubious: “…Motion pictures in which the situations are far removed from the realm of reason or possibility. Of necessity this shuts out such classic genre films as Frankenstein, 2001, and Metropolis—man is already transplanting human limbs and organs, building space stations, and subjecting his world to the hazards of dictatorship”. Well, yes, but the scenarios of the three films in question might be felt to take these themes rather further than Rovin blandly implies here, and the underlying suspicion has to be that he simply can’t think of anything new to say about them.
Fabulous Fantasy Films has seventeen themed chapters: The Ghost / Angels and Death / Witchcraft and Voodoo / The Devil / The Vampire / The Werewolf / The Mummy / The Monster / The Dinosaur / The Giant Monster / Mythology / Fantastic Science / Incredible Lands / Magic and Beyond / Fantasy Animation / Fantasy Film Anthologies / Television. There is also a 500-entry filmography (featuring directors and producers but not writers—does Rovin think these films somehow wrote themselves?), and a closing section of six (very) brief interviews with George Pal, Tony ‘7 Faces of Dr Lao’ Randall, Robert Wise, Ray Harryhausen, William Castle and Ricou Browning. The drab pinky-violet cover is possibly the most boring of any book in this entire survey, and can hardly have encouraged many browsing schoolkids to investigate further—a genuine pity when the content is broadly excellent.
36) DERRY Dark Dreams—The Horror Film from Psycho to Jaws (143pp including Filmography, Bibliography and Index)
Dark Dreams is another mini-landmark in this sequence, the very first attempt to consider modern horror in a structured socio-political / psychological context. Author Derry has a similar background to Rovin, also born in 1951 and obtaining a BA (from NU in Evanston, Illinois) in 1973, then a MA (in cinema) from USC in 1975, before going into freelance writing. Dark Dreams was followed in 1988 by The Suspense Thriller: Films in the Shadow of Alfred Hitchcock, and indeed Derry is such an obsessive devotee of the latter it frequently feels like EVERYTHING is in Hitch’s (portly) shadow. This fixation is partly explained in Dark Dreams’ Introduction, in which the author wittily describes dragging his parents (aged nine) to see Psycho at the local family cinema in Maple Heights, Ohio, and the clearly formative effect this experience had.
To quote the inner-jacket blurb: “By studying the evolution of the [horror] genre and noting its themes and iconography, we can learn much about our society and psychology as well as about the films themselves… Dark Dreams takes as its subject the three cycles of horror film that began in the Sixties. The chapter on The Horror of Personality deals with that cycle of [serial killer] films that began with Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho… The chapter on The Horror of Armageddon deals with that cycle of [apocalyptic] films that began with Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds… The chapter on The Horror of the Demonic deals with that cycle of [occult] films that began with Rosemary’s Baby and continued through The Exorcist.” In a lively Foreword, John Russell Taylor expresses the frustration Derry must feel that Hitch didn’t make the latter pair as well: “It is curious, though, that Hitchcock, a devout Catholic from childhood, should not have touched the third [category] Horror of the Demonic and has had virtually no truck with the supernatural at all in his career. Does it perhaps come too close to home for a true believer? Who knows?”
Dark Dreams is well-written and interesting, though inevitably its rigid tripartite thesis means Derry has to shoehorn some entries into categories they don’t quite fit, and fudge a few of his arguments as a result. But this is still a groundbreakingly fresh approach to the material, and (to take just one example) represents the earliest attempt to take Toho’s kaiju cycle seriously on its own terms: “The use of this cinematic mythology to explain away the unexplainable atomic holocaust, and to build from those fears a creative world with its own rules and moral order is an achievement not to be dismissed as cheap popular kitsch, but to be studied as a source of Japanese creative consciousness and conscience.” In 1977 this still represented cutting-edge thinking. Dark Dreams also features an appendix of five lengthy director-interviews: Robert Aldrich (conducted by Derry himself), William Castle (by Dan Scappercotti), Curtis Harrington (by Dale Winogura), George Romero (by Tony Scott), and William Friedkin (by Bill Crouch), all of which are pertinent and revealing. The three allegedly chronological Filmographies are not to be trusted however—for some reason Derry dates Peeping Tom as 1962, whereas it actually preceded Psycho by two clear months (April / June 1960)—though that obviously doesn’t suit his Hitch-as-pioneer angle….
37) DAVIDSON Great Monsters of the Movies (128pp including Bibliography and Index)
The last pocket-paperback of the 70s does absolutely nothing new (and can’t even be bothered to come up with a new title, simply borrowing Edelson’s instead) but is still good, simple-minded, well-illustrated fun (only 40 of its 128 pages are actually text, the remainder being juicy wall-to-wall stills). Nothing whatever can be gleaned about its author (whose only book this seems to be), and there’s a good chance the name is a pseudonym. For whatever it’s worth there are four chapters—The Frankenstein Monster / Creatures of the Night / Man Into Monster / Creatures From Other Worlds—and the frontispiece blurb essentially says it all: “HOLD ONTO YOUR SEATS! Here are the greatest movie monsters of all time. Find out all about Dracula, the Frankenstein monster, the Wolf Man, King Kong, Godzilla, and many many more. Jam-packed with photos, this book will show you how the movies were made, introduce you to the stars who played in them, give you lots of other intriguing facts—all guaranteed to keep you turning from one spine-chilling page to another. IF YOU’VE EVER BEEN SCARED BY A MOVIE MONSTER, THIS BOOK IS FOR YOU!!!” The most recent film mentioned (appropriately for the target audience) is Night of the Lepus (1972).
38) GLUT Classic Movie Monsters (442pp including Index)
Donald F Glut (b.1944) is one of the best-known US fan-turned-professionals, who graduated from gawping at Shock Theater and devouring Famous Monsters to eventually writing his own books and directing his own films. Between 1953-69 he shot about forty amateur monster home-movies (latterly gaining some coverage in FM), then from 1970 onwards turned professional, scriptwriting extensively for TV and (from 1996) beginning to direct straight-to-video exploitation fodder. He has also written about 65 fiction and non-fiction books, most famously the novelisation of The Empire Strikes Back (1980). To quote the preface of Classic Movie Monsters: “I’ve tried to cover the nine greatest monsters and fiends of the movies—the Wolf Man, Dr Jekyll (and his alter-ego Mr Hyde), the Invisible Man, the Mummy, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Phantom of the Opera, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, King Kong and Godzilla—along with their monstrous kith and kin. Conspicuously absent from these pages are the Frankenstein Monster and Count Dracula—aficionados of these perhaps most famous horrors of all, I refer to my earlier books The Frankenstein Legend (1973) and The Dracula Book (1975), both published by Scarecrow Press.” In fact Glut’s character-choices precisely mirror the original classic line-up of Aurora’s celebrated 1960’s plastic monster-models (with the exception of the Invisible Man, who wouldn’t have made much of a kit).
Classic Movie Monsters thus does exactly what it says on the tin: nine themed chapters containing a genuinely exhaustive discussion of EVERY appearance (no matter how obscure) of its nine subjects—Glut generously credits both Donald Willis’ and Walt Lee’s landmark Checklists as key reference resources in this respect. There’s also a witty Introduction by Curt Siodmak, featuring some sharp observations about his own career: he was paid $400 a week for writing The Wolfman, and when (following its massive box-office success) he asked for a $25-a-week raise, Universal promptly fired him.
Although Glut’s prose is fluent enough, Classic Movie Monsters is truthfully not a particularly easy read. Like Dettman’s The Horror Factory it is semi-professionally printed (in eye-watering Century type) from what looks to be Glut’s original manuscript. Although (unlike Dettman’s effort) it HAS been properly proof-read, the laboriously underlined titles and heavily indented, double-spaced paragraphs rapidly induce a headache—a pity as the content is generally definitive. The (nice) cover-illustration of Chaney’s Phantom is by the author’s wife Linda.
39) MURPHY The Celluloid Vampires—A History and Filmography 1897-1979 (351pp including Bibliography and Index)
Following the combined earlier efforts of Pattison, Silver and Pirie, by this point readers may well be wondering what more there is to say about the (extremely well-trodden) topic of cinematic vampirism, and the answer here is truthfully “not much”. There’s nothing particularly wrong with The Celluloid Vampires, but it brings absolutely nothing fresh to the table either and indeed its historical analysis is often notably weak—the background to Hammer’s key contributions for example is feeble (little attempt is made to discuss the practical / commercial context in which their influential films appeared), with a great deal of time and effort instead being given over to pointlessly extended plot-summaries. 40% of the book’s page-count is made up of the closing Filmography, and while this IS more complete than any of its predecessors, that’s only because it deliberately throws in ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING, up to and including (for example) films in which a character fleetingly dresses up as a vampire for a costume-party etc.
There are seven chapters: Vamps and Vampires / The Lugosi Era / Multiple Horrors / Lederer and Lee / A Return to Tradition / A Profusion of Vampires / Temporary Decline. Once again the author himself is an enigma, sharing his name with several other professional writers so that any details of his specific background or subsequent work (assuming there was any) are impossible to come by. Although we can genuinely admire the forensic attention to detail showcased, it is impossible not to wish Murphy had applied it to something a bit more original.
40) TURNER Forgotten Horrors—Early Talkie Chillers From Poverty Row (216pp including Index)
Forgotten Horrors—like Dark Dreams before it, yet another offering from Barnes—was the last (Sept ’79) horror film book of the Seventies, and perhaps appropriately very much pointed the way forward. By this stage the commercial potential of simple histories (whether chronological or themed) had effectively been mined out, and the only direction left was (inevitably) Specialisation. This essentially meant either radical new interpretations of familiar material (like Derry’s), OR the determined championing of previously neglected obscurities. Forgotten Horrors, as its title suggests, is a pioneering example of the latter.
Forgotten Horrors is a chronological catalogue of 115 independent US thrillers produced between 1929-1937. Even the most dedicated fan will not have heard of most of these, the chief reason being quite simply that the authors have deliberately cast their net VERY wide. To quote from their Introduction: “[We] call attention to these forgotten chillers without segregating them into such categories as Western, whodunnit, spooky comedy, jungle / piracy adventure, or outright horror melodrama. The criterion [for selection] is that the film conveys a strange menace” This is fair enough, but the unavoidable fact is that only a small amount (certainly less than 20%) actually fall into the recognisable ‘horror melodrama’ category, with the vast majority being straightforward knockabout romps with some minor mystery element (eg Westerns with masked protagonists, or serials with sinister Oriental villains etc etc). This is in no sense to diminish the book’s importance and interest, but the attention-grabbing title is in this respect slightly misleading.
The scholarship on display however is exhaustive (not to say exhausting). Each film gets a full cast and credits listing, followed by a Synopsis and Notes (ie detailed contextual discussion). The book’s Introduction also offers an unsentimental description of the much-maligned producers: “The true Poverty Row outfits [of the 30s] obtained financing, rented studio-space as needed, avoided retakes and special effects, and commissioned only necessary lab-work. They produced on shoestring budgets and fast schedules, often shooting a feature for as little as $8,000 to $10,000 in as few as four to ten days. Typical are Monogram, Mascot, Majestic, Puritan, Invincible-Chesterfield, Reliable and Progressive. Most dealt largely in low-budget Westerns for the rural and Saturday-matinee trade [dismissively labelled by Variety as “the shirtsleeve audience”]. Their non-Western product was designed for the bottom of the double-bills programmed by most urban theatres… Few of these shows played Broadway; most therefore were not reviewed outside the trade press [and] the handful that were reviewed for the general public were treated as a rule with contempt…” Many of the films discussed now seem definitively Lost, and have been painstakingly reconstructed via surviving publicity materials.
Authors George E Turner (1925-1999) and Michael H Price (b.1947) both had solid journalistic pedigrees. Turner was a writer and illustrator (latterly best-remembered for 1975’s popular The Making of King Kong), who worked as art-director of a Texan newspaper for thirty years before arriving in Hollywood in the late 70s as a film/TV storyboard artist (and later editor of American Cinematographer magazine). Price similarly describes himself as a “professional jazz musician, frustrated cartoonist, and former financial editor/columnist who deals in advertising and PR in addition to teaching film-appreciation courses”. Perhaps against the odds, Forgotten Horrors has since grown from a clunky one-shot labour of love into a successful forty-year franchise, currently on its 11th (2017) volume (along with various expanded reprints and Specials etc) having gradually worked its way through to the 1970s grindhouse entries that were still being shot when the first instalment appeared. Pop, as they say, Will Eat Itself.
EPILOGUE—The Rise and Fall of the Horror Film Critic
Early in 1978 I went to the Birmingham WHSmiths preview of a book entitled The Vampire Cinema. Some 85 minutes later I left the bookshop somewhat nauseated and very much shocked. What a sad state of affairs it was when a fine writer such as David Pirie could reproduce such senseless, stomach-turning violence. Was it necessary to show that picture of a helpless Udo Keir having his leg chopped off on page 140? Were the stills of peepshow sex and extreme nudity on pages 19, 21, 96 (especially 96), 98, 101, 102, 103 (also very extreme), 105, 107, 111, 118-119 (stared at this one for absolutely ages), 144, 150 and 159 good for anything but exploitation? Has the horror film book become nothing more than a genre to titillate and then brutalise the emotions? How did all this come to pass? Whatever happened to that nice Denis Gifford?
Sorry, couldn’t resist. OK, let’s start again. Ahem.
“Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it” as Edmund Burke once famously said. Or may have said. Other sources variously attribute the line to George Santayana, Sara Shepard, Pittacus Lore, Cynthia Patterson and, er, Lemony Snicket. It’s come to something when a celebrated quote about historical ignorance being doomed to repeat itself seems doomed to repeat itself.
But of course Edmund (or Lemony) was referring to Military (and to a lesser extent Political) history. What about Popular Culture? Are horror film critics similarly doomed to repeat themselves in an apparently never-ending cycle? The evidence might well be thought to speak for itself.
Here is part of Kim Newman’s (b.1959) chatty Introduction to the 2nd (1988) edition of his landmark Nightmare Movies:
“By 1983 when I started working on Nightmare Movies, there were already many good, bad and indifferent histories of the horror film on the market. The ground-breakers, Carlos Clarens’s An Illustrated History of the Horror Film and Ivan Butler’s The Horror Film, were both published in 1967. Most of the subsequent books give the impression that even if they weren’t published before 1968, they might as well have been…. Somehow, well into the 1970s, it was possible for experts to make statements like ‘Night of the Demon is the last genuine horror “classic” we have had’… I set out to concentrate on what had happened in the genre since Clarens, Everson and Gifford closed their books. My generation has a new pantheon of greats, from George A. Romero to Sam Raimi….. The flipside of this is that recently I’ve started wondering if I’m turning into Denis Gifford. I’ll stick by the opinions expressed here, but I keep coming across enthusiasts acclaiming the Nightmare on Elm Street series, Fright Night or Re-Animator as classics. There are even people out there writing respectfully about the Friday the 13th films and House. Some of these are pretty good, but I don’t think they quite stack up against the best of Romero and Cronenberg, or even Halloween and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre…..”
And here is Robin Wood (1931-2009), another influential UK figure (co-curator of the groundbreaking ‘American Nightmare’ Toronto festival of Sept 1979), who pioneered a new, more politically-engaged approach to horror film criticism—the following is extracted from his typically acerbic 2001 essay ‘What Lies Beneath?’:
“I suspect that the almost total incomprehension (more precisely, REFUSAL of comprehension) with which Day of the Dead has been received is simply the result of its late date: by 1985 we had already entered the era of hysterical masculinity that countered the radical feminism of the ’70s… although [Day of the Dead is] made by a man, it stands (and, when it is too late, will probably be recognised as) one of the great feminist movies. It is also, for me, the last great American horror film… Are significant horror films being made outside America?—in the East, in Italy? I am not qualified to answer this question, though it seems necessary to raise it. The Italian horror films of Bava and Argento have their defenders; the few I have seen struck me as obsessively preoccupied with violence against women, dramatized in particularly grotesque images…. The genre’s deterioration is easy to chart. Around 1980 it moves crucially from the release of repressed (and therefore terrifying) energies to “teenagers endlessly punished for having sex”- and why has this perversion of the genre been so popular with teenagers? Presumably because, while it is exactly what, at their age, they ought to be doing (besides protesting vigorously about almost everything happening in the dominant culture), their parents make them feel guilty.
From there to the “spoof” is an easy leap (about two inches), stupidity (of the characters, of the films themselves) being already generically inherent. Actually, the “spoof” horror film (unnecessary to give titles, I think) simply carries the “slaughter of sexual teenagers” ’80s subdivision of the genre one step further: all those naughty teens can now enjoy themselves without taking their punishment seriously. Just one small problem: in all the films I can recall (and they have fused themselves into one horrible confused image of sex-and-slaughter) the teens hardly ever achieve orgasm. The popularity of these films with teenagers is vastly more interesting, and even more depressing, than the films themselves ever are. Given that all these films operate on a very low level of artistic or thematic interest, it is (I suppose) still possible to make certain distinctions. The original Halloween, which had the dubious distinction of initiating the entire cycle, and is therefore of historic interest, was a well made and effective film; the entire Friday the 13th series fully deserves to go, with Jason, to hell; the Nightmare on Elm Street films have a marginally more interesting monster and (especially the first) a certain flair in invention and design. What more can one say?”
What indeed? Bring back that nihilistic Michael Reeves and his brutal Witchfinding IMMEDIATELY. At least he wasn’t obsessively preoccupied with violence against women, dramatized in particularly grotesque images. Erm….
It’s worth pausing briefly at this point to consider exactly what Wood (one of Newman’s cited critical inspirations) is really saying here. At the time he wrote the above, he was a full FIFTY YEARS OLDER than the feckless teenagers whose taste he finds so frustratingly inexplicable. This would be comical if it wasn’t such a wearyingly familiar theme. Newman has already expressed dismay that Everson had the gall to write in 1974 that Night of the Demon (1958) was “the ‘last genuine horror ‘classic’ we have had”—and yet Day of the Dead, after PRECISELY THE SAME LENGTH OF TIME is, in 2001, apparently “the last great American horror film.” Could it possibly be, we find ourselves pondering, that what followed these respective Classics was not actually MADE for this pair of miserable old gits?
Two questions have insistently emerged from this survey: (i) Why are horror films not as good as they used to be? and (ii) Why has everyone suddenly started taking them so seriously / not seriously enough? Let’s consider these ideas individually.
(i) We like horror films as adults because we liked them as children, and their appeal essentially reminds us of our younger, more excitable, more emotional, more imaginative selves. As Calvin Beck pointed out, IMAGINATION—mankind’s sole redeeming virtue, remember—is absolutely central to our appreciation of these pieces of fluff. But at some point we simply get too old for new examples to affect us emotionally in quite the same way. For Wood, “the genre’s deterioration is easy to chart”, and we can only admire his piercingly objective gaze (which was hopefully never directed towards a shaving mirror). This is in no sense to denigrate his (or indeed Everson’s) accomplishments and contribution. But the only possible response to all this moaning is a sense of bemused deja vu. Young fans devour the books of their heroes and are inspired to later write their own, while firmly resolving to avoid their ridiculously grumpy outlook. Yet we all (to quote Newman) end up turning into Denis Gifford. The reason horror films are not as good as they used to be is inevitably because by the time the books get written, the films concerned are already being made for a completely different audience.
(ii) How seriously should we take horror films? This is, if anything, an even more interesting question. When Forry Ackerman was trying to pitch the idea of Famous Monsters to Jim Warren in late 1957, the latter allegedly said “Ok, I’m eleven and-a-half years old—make me laugh.” Ackerman succeeded, but unfortunately in the process inadvertently cemented the entire early (socially-acceptable) approach to Horror. FM’s pun-filled wordplay became THE default style to such an extent that when Brad Steiger wrote the first modestly serious book on the subject in 1965, he felt obliged to print a spoof Warning Notice at the start formally declaring his break with tradition. Two years later, Ivan Butler was similarly careful to repudiate literary ‘lurid sensationalism’ in his own Introduction, and ALL the early books in this survey make the effort (implicit or explicit) to distance themselves conceptually from FM.
But once Clarens had established a bestselling formula that didn’t rely on juvenile humour the academic floodgates were opened, and many distinctly po-faced entries in this survey (Clarens’ own included) would in fact BENEFIT from a few decent gags—always keeping in mind the clear difference between clunky FM-style puns and genuine wit. Either way, the increasing influx of self-conscious Intellectuals (notably some of Huss’s 1972 essayists, plus, later, Dillard and Soren) had within ten years prompted Moss, Brosnan, Frank and others to begin complaining that an excessively highbrow approach was stifling what was at heart an essentially intuitive / emotional art-form. Here is a typically amiable Terence Fisher being interviewed by Brosnan in 1976: “I look upon myself not as an intellectual film director but as an emotional film director—I work from emotion and intuition and as far as people are concerned who want to analyse my work—well a director shouldn’t speak for his films, they should speak for themselves… I’m not going to try and justify anything of mine. But I liked Pirie’s book immensely because it has probably taught me more about what I do instinctively and intuitively than I realised myself…. [However] a writer who tries to analyse what someone else has done, and the person who’s actually done it, are in two different spheres of approach It’s what THEY get emotionally… Someone gets one thing, and someone else gets something different. All interpretations are equally valid.”
So, all interpretations are equally valid, but perhaps (to paraphrase Orwell) some are more Equally Valid than others. Horror films ARE important, because as a popular art-form they subversively remind us that there IS still mystery and romance and—dare one suggest – even Meaning behind our apparently otherwise meaningless existence. But they are also extremely silly, which is why we should feel free to make jokes about them, because a sense of humour is another (much underrated) key characteristic of being human in the first place.
Trying to sum all this up, what can we say about our little group of pioneering historians? The oldest was Friedman (b.1900), closely followed by Butler, and the youngest probably Pirie (b.1953), though the vast majority were born between the wars (from Turner in 1925 through to Frank in 1937). Some (I’m looking at you, Dettman) are deeply unappetising egotists, while others (Baraket) are transparently delighted to have the opportunity to write a book at all. Some, like Pirie, excitingly break new ground, while others like Manchel and Edelson can barely be bothered to disguise their plagiarism. Some, like Steiger, are genuinely funny, while others (I’m looking at you AGAIN Dettman) most decidedly are not. Some, like Brosnan, are down-to-earth pragmatists, while others (hello there Profs Dillard and Soren) are self-promoting pseudo-intellectuals. Most of our authors at least seem to LIKE the genre, though Clarens doesn’t appear to like anything all that much, and Manchel and Edelson are merely going through the motions in order to get their names on yet another book cover.
The end of the 70s saw a definitive changing of the Horror guard. In August 1979 a new competitor to the ailing Famous Monsters appeared, speculatively entitled Fangoria. The first six issues (featuring a generic fantasy-film approach) were a commercial flop, losing so much money ($20k a time allegedly) that an urgent editorial rethink was reluctantly agreed. From #7 (August 1980) Fangoria instead began covering contemporary horror with an ever-increasing focus on gory make-up / SPFX features, which—under editor Bob Martin—rapidly made the enforced U-turn one of the major publishing successes of the 80s. The two key books of the decade meanwhile were Newman’s already-mentioned Nightmare Movies (which followed Derry’s psychological approach), and John McCarty’s massively influential Splatter Movies—Breaking the Last Taboo from Sept 1981, which (taking Fangoria’s cue) brashly identified an entire sub-genre, and had a revisionist impact similar to Pirie’s of eight years earlier (not that the latter would probably appreciate the comparison).
However, all this is for someone else to discuss. The current writer grew up in the 70s, and secretly thinks that horror films are not as good as they used to be.
© Sim Branaghan Oct—Dec 2018.
