14) EYLES The House of Horror—The Story of Hammer Films (128pp including annotated Filmography)
As if to reinforce the point, just a fortnight after Chaney died (on 12th July) the first book dedicated solely to Hammer appeared, quickly followed by another in Sept, the pair jointly negating Gifford’s entire critical position in six weeks flat. The duo thus remain inseparable, and while the second (to be discussed in a moment) was by far the more academically rigorous, it was the first that everyone bought. The House of Horror was continuously in print (including two later updated editions) for over twenty years.
The publishers, Lorrimer, are important enough to be discussed in their own right later on, while author Eyles has of course already featured (two co-editors—Robert Adkinson and Nicholas Fry—are also credited, though the extent of their input is uncertain and may have been limited to research assistance). The timing of the book’s appearance is key to understanding its legacy. In Jan 1973 Michael Carreras had formally purchased Hammer from his father Sir James, the latter retiring at the age of 64. Michael (then 46) must have imagined THoH would be a neatly-timed celebration of the handover, but his short-lived (and ultimately unsuccessful) tenure meant it effectively became Hammer’s epitaph. The annotated filmography at the end lists 140 films 1935-73, all but the first four set up by Sir James. During the six ensuing years that Michael was in charge, he would only manage to add a further five of his own to the total.
The book has five sections: Four Voices from the House of Hammer [interviews with Carreras Jr, Fisher, Lee and Cushing] / Hammer Rides Out [early days 1935-55] / The Return of Frankenstein [the horrors] / Hammer’s Other Worlds [everything else] / Brides of Dracula—and Others [sixteen full-page cheesecake photos]. The opening interviews are interesting, if very politicised. Carreras understandably glosses over the bitter differences with his father, optimistically talking up his plans for diversification. Fisher is low-key and reticent, diffidently crediting Sangster’s scripts and Robinson’s sets as being central to his early success. Lee is remarkably generous about his (soon to be ex-) employers, though clearly indicates his desire to now move on. Cushing (still reeling from the recent death of his wife) is thoughtful and incisive, and clearly indicates his desire to stay put (and distract himself from the unbearable loss via non-stop work).
The writing for the three history chapters is adequate (if necessarily somewhat perfunctory), but THoH is really all about the pictures, the focus unashamedly being on glamour (ie sex), with a photographic nipple-count that must have sent many young readers’ pulses racing. The casual lack of detail on the behind-the-scenes talent is in contrast frustrating, but realistically there just isn’t space when almost every film mentioned gets a capsule plot-summary. The vivid original cover (a close-up detail from Mike Vaughan’s garish poster artwork for Twins of Evil) is now justly iconic.
15) PIRIE A Heritage of Horror—The English Gothic Cinema 1946-1972 (192pp including Appendices and Filmography / Index)
Although The House of Horror (just) pipped it to the post, Pirie’s book is unarguably THE breakthrough text in Brit horror criticism, a dazzlingly fresh and sophisticated achievement all the more impressive when it is remembered the author was still only in his teens when it was published. As the jacket-flap blurb pugnaciously states “The emergent genre has been the significant major casualty of the persistent refusal to take English commercial films seriously, and yet the horror film is the only cinematic myth which Britain can claim as its own”. Pirie was not only the first person to make this now-obvious argument, he contrived to make it more articulately than practically anyone else has managed since.
Pirie (b.1953) grew up in Liverpool, was educated at Glenalmond, precociously studied for a BA at the University of York, then finally moved to London in 1971 where he contributed to Sight and Sound and the Monthly Film Bulletin before becoming Time Out’s film editor. From the early 80s he shifted into writing his own (often award-winning) screenplays, of which the BBC’s Rainy Day Women (1983) remains probably the best-remembered. A Heritage of Horror comprises ten densely-argued chapters: The Characteristics of English Gothic Literature / The Identification of Hammer / The World of Terence Fisher / Approaches to Frankenstein / Approaches to Dracula / Other Approaches to Horror [‘Sadian’ Movies & Amicus] / Three Satellite Directors [Sharp, Gilling, Sewell] / Science Fiction, Exoticism and Psychosis / A Renaissance of Themes and Ideas [Reeves & Hessler etc] / Towards a New Horror Mythology.
As can be seen, the basic approach follows Drake Douglas’s lead of returning to the literary inspirations, though Pirie is here vastly more scholarly and authoritative. He does nevertheless rather slavishly follow the traditional auteur-line, heavily privileging directors over scriptwriters and producers, so that (for example) his total disinterest in Tony Hinds’s role at Hammer is a serious weakness. But the overall vigour, force and confidence of his arguments and analysis is unmistakeable, and would soon prove highly influential. He ends with an Appendix containing five checklists (for Hammer, Fisher, Gilling, Sewell and Sharp respectively), followed by an annotated Filmography notable for its occasional truculent opinions on then-recent releases eg The Abominable Dr Phibes (“Perhaps the worst horror film made in England since 1945”), Dracula AD 1972 (“a further decline in the series… full of excruciating cliches and archaisms”) and The Nightcomers (“one of the dullest and most unimaginative British films ever made”).
16) EDELSON Great Monsters of the Movies (102pp including Index)
From the sublime to the ridiculous. If Manchel is essentially dumbed-down Clarens, Edelson offers the distinctly unedifying spectacle of dumbed-down Aylesworth. Just because you are writing for children (and it is to be fervently hoped Edelson IS writing for children), doesn’t mean you have to automatically talk down to them. GMotM is sloppily written second-hand rubbish from an author all-too obviously disinterested in his topic. There is not one single original or interesting observation / insight in the entire book, and spitefully selecting a couple of representatively banal quotes to illustrate this would feel cheap.
Edelson (b.1932) was a graduate of NYU who went on to specialise in science writing, penning about twenty books on the subject including a couple of college chemistry textbooks (which may well have made more interesting reading than GMotM), also acting as science editor for the New York Daily News 1971-91. Great Monsters of the Movies comprises five chapters: The Legends / The Pioneers / Three Frightening Men [Karloff, Lugosi, Chaney Jr] / The Big Beasts / A Miscellany of Monsters. One can only assume his publishers enviously eyed Aylesworth’s earlier success and asked him to come up with something similar ASAP. Should this sound unfair, here is Aylesworth on Creature From the Black Lagoon (p128): “Oddly enough, although he spends most of his life at the bottom of the lagoon, when he comes to the surface he never seems to have any mud or water plants on his body”, and here is Edelson (p94): “…the monster is too well groomed for its own good (shouldn’t a creature that lives in a black lagoon be dripping with seaweed and barnacles?)” Later in the same paragraph Edelson also mentions that the Creature was “created by Ray Harryhausen”, and where have we heard that before, eh?
17) FRIEDMAN Great Horror Movies (160pp)
Great Horror Movies is, in its unassuming way, arguably the most interesting of the smaller pocket-paperback entries in this sequence. For a start, author F Louis Friedman (1900-1990) is easily our most venerable contributor, old enough to have potentially seen Caligari on its original (March 1921) US release, something none of our other writers can claim. Friedman arrived in Hollywood in 1944 and worked as a prolific Tinseltown journalist for the next 25 years or so (including a spell with Fox Publicity 1951-57), occasionally hitting the headlines himself as a result. In 1959 he was involved in a landmark court case when one of his articles about Liz Taylor was deliberately plagiarised, and in 1963 was the subject of much faux-outrage when a piece about Connie Stevens ungallantly suggested “her singing voice is thin and reedy and… her hips too big”. Ouch.
By the end of the 60’s Friedman had switched to writing a sequence of young-adult paperbacks for Scholastic Corp, who enjoyed (and continue to enjoy) a vast readership due to their historic monopoly on US grade-school Book Club distribution. Friedman wrote at least six Scholastic titles, including two sequential US histories: Old Hate, New Hope (1860-1914) and Between Two Wars (1914-1939)—both from 1970—plus a trio of more populist offerings: Great Movies on TV (1972), Meet Elvis Presley (1973), and What’s in a Name (1976), the latter an etymology primer. But he is undoubtedly now best-remembered for Great Horror Movies, a notably sharp and (thanks to his numerous Hollywood contacts) well-informed historical survey.
Friedman employs a novel approach, analysing seventy different films in six themed chapters: Early Horror and the Late Late Show—the first of the Real Cool Ghouls / Monsters from the Seas, the Skies, the Earth / Haunts, Spooks and Eerie-Weirdies / Werewolves, Vampires and Cat People / Wild Brains and other Creepy-Crawlies / Sci-Fi—Superbeings, Alien Life, and the Terrors of the Nuclear Age. Despite the jokey headings, the treatment is tersely serious and the historical detail impressive—Friedman is very good at digging out the telling backstage anecdote or box-office snippet. Each film gets a one/two page analysis with cast and credits appended, occasionally followed by a brief overview of themed follow-ups. The oldest film discussed is Caligari (including some shrewd detail on its New York premiere) and the most recent Planet of the Apes. Hammer doesn’t appear (apart from The Nanny), but this is a far from conservative selection with some notably unusual choices including Bobbikins, The Boy with Green Hair, Fail-Safe, Lord of the Flies, The Mind Benders, The Servant, and The Tenth Victim. As a first introduction to the subject for a generation of bookish US schoolkids this is really pretty good stuff, with a consistently readable ‘Hollywood Insider’ angle.
18) FRANK Horror Movies—Tales of Terror in the Cinema (160pp including Index)
Although boy-wonder Pirie remains the most historically significant of our UK authors, Alan Frank is (alongside Denis Gifford) nowadays undoubtedly the most fondly regarded, responsible for three bestselling oversize picture-books that combined Gifford’s accessible populism with a fresh outlook finally acknowledging Hammer & Co’s contribution. While Gifford was quite happy to plaster his books with Hammer’s best stills (whilst airily deriding the films themselves), Frank saw no reason to treat their output as any less important than Universal’s. The fact that his nonchalantly unaffected writing style was considerably less wearing also undoubtedly helped.
Frank (b.1937) grew up in Tanganyika (now Kenya) on the East African coast, and is probably the only author in this survey to speak fluent Swahili. Arriving in England in 1956 to study medicine at Cambridge, a lab accident injuring his hand meant he was forced to abandon his studies and instead became an advertising copywriter in London (though his real passion remained cinema). His London neighbour sometimes babysat, and—noting his impressive library of film books—mentioned her husband worked for publisher Octopus, then in the process of assembling a ‘Movie Treasury’ series of picture books (Westerns, Gangsters, Thrillers etc). Would Alan like to try writing one about horror films? A neat example of being in the right place at just the right time.
Horror Movies has seven themed chapters: The Baron / The Count / Back From the Dead / Metamorphoses and Masquerades / Meet the Ladies / Madmen, Demented Doctors and Psychopath Scientists / All Creatures Great and Small. Two features in particular distinguish it from the immediate competition. The first is the superb range of (mostly previously unseen) stills reproduced—easily the best selection since Gifford’s—aligned with Octopus’s plush production values (the skeletal horses from Captain Clegg lined up on the black boards beneath the dustjacket are a particularly nice touch). The second is the casual air of authority stemming from Frank’s long list of contacts in the business. He had worked regularly as a film extra during his Cambridge years, and in a convivial way was already impressively well connected. The Acknowledgements page for Horror Movies reads like a Who’s Who of key post-war figures, from the Carrerases (father and son), Fisher, Sangster and Francis et al, to producers like Herman Cohen and Anthony Nelson Keys, specialists like Roy Ashton, and even veteran directors like Jack Arnold. All of these characters would have had stories to tell, and—while their presence isn’t overt—the collective sense of first-hand experience is what makes the difference here, and gives the book its enduring freshness.
19) ANNAN Cinefantastic—Beyond the Dream Machine (132pp including Index) — and the ensuing Lorrimer series —
Lorrimer Publishing were the UK’s first specialist cinema publisher, run between 1967-84 by Peter (Lorrimer) Whitehead and Andrew Sinclair from 47 Dean Street W1 in the heart of Soho. They started out printing a series of respectably academic ‘Classic and Modern Film Scripts’ covering dozens of avant-garde titles, but after the bestselling success of The House of Horror embarked on a more populist sequence of heavily-illustrated genre softbacks, in uniform quarto (9¾”x6¾”) format. The first of these to appear was Cinefantastic in June 1974, and over the next couple of years a mini-flood of about a dozen others swiftly followed, in the majority of which horror/fantasy material typically predominated.
In addition to the six titles in our main checklist, three others that contained some fantasy content were Robot—the Mechanical Monster and Catastrophe—the End of the Cinema (both by David Annan), plus Freaks—Cinema of the Bizarre by Werner Adrian. Other entries included Speed—Cinema of Motion (also by Adrian), Cut—the Unseen Cinema and Swastika—Cinema of Oppression (both by Baxter Phillips), Kung Fu—Cinema of Vengeance by Verina Glaessner, Savage Cinema by Rick Trader Witcombe, Celluloid Rock—Twenty Years of Movie Rock by Philip Jenkinson and Alan Warner, and Italian Western—the Opera of Violence by Laurence Staig and Tony Williams.
The Lorrimer books were so formulaic and ephemeral it doesn’t really make sense to discuss them individually, though that’s not to belittle their impact—they were hugely popular, and turned a whole generation of young British fans onto the delights of previously subterranean cult and underground cinema, particularly foreign obscurities that had not then received wide (or indeed often any) UK distribution. In format they were essentially rambling essays on loose themes that were generally little more than an excuse to throw together as many lurid stills as possible. They gleefully mixed up arthouse and exploitation material, blithely avoiding any distinction between the two (or indeed any real auteur-based criticism at all), and instead concentrated on drawing random links between all sorts of disparate international threads. Their content thus varied wildly but was never less than provocative, permanently driven by the eye-popping illustrations (which typically combined sex ‘n’ violence with abandon). These were not books your mother would have approved of, which naturally only made them all the more exciting.
Briefly considering the quintet catalogued in our checklist, no biographical information on either David Annan or Rose London appears to exist (their books are significantly copyrighted to Lorrimer alone on the imprint pages), and it seems very likely that both are pseudonyms, possibly for prolific anthologist Peter Haining (1940-2007). Cinefantastic has four chapters (Myths / Machines / Visions / Nightmares), as does Ape (Descent of Ape / Making of Kong / Kin of Kong / Ape Dreams). Cinema of Mystery—a slightly more coherent Poe survey—has eight (Quoth the Raven, Evermore / Rest not in Peace / Omen of Death / The Beat and the Blade / The Conqueror Worm / The Track of the Beast / The Haunted Palace / Himself the Undead), while Zombie has six (The Fear of the Undead / The Cult of the Coffin / Blood For the Dead / The Walking Horrors / Zombies / The Future of the Buried). Further analysis is probably redundant.
By far the most significant of the Lorrimer titles (after The House of Horror) was Barrie Pattison’s The Seal of Dracula (136pp including Filmography), the first (April 1975) attempt to produce an overview of that perennial favourite the Vampire film. Pattison (b.1945)—an Australian editor / director whose cine-journalism appeared in such dedicated UK magazines as Monster Mag and House of Hammer—offered a groundbreakingly internationalist approach combined with a briskly readable prose style. The concluding paragraph of his terse introduction notes: “The subject is full of curious contradictions—the most censor-obsessed area of film is the one which finds its great public among children and adolescents. The three great taboos—sex, violence and religion—compete for attention. Also, these films are not an academic study. Each of the major titles discussed in the text—and a lot of the lesser ones—has been available for public viewing in the commercial cinemas of Paris and London during the six months over which this book has been written”.
Seal of Dracula comprises thirteen lively chapters—Silent Vampires / Talkie Vampires / The English Vampire / The Italian Vampire / Vampires From Mexico and the Philippines / The Spanish Vampire / Sex Vampires / New Vampires / Cowboys, Spacemen and Nazi Beasts / The Saga of the Draculas / Batmen From the Box / Art and Commerce / Lust, Blood and God—and an awful lot of photographs of lady vampires with their tops off (fortunately the script always demanded it).
20) EVERSON Classics of the Horror Film (248pp)
Classics of the Horror Film (‘From the days of the Silent Film to the Exorcist’ to include its full subtitle) is an important book in this sequence, since—arguably for the first time—it actively tells its readership what to think. THESE are Classics, Everson authoritatively declares, while THESE most certainly are not. This being the case, the first step in evaluating its critical credibility has to be to examine its author’s pedigree, which—to be quite fair—is pretty impressive.
Everson (1929-1996) was one of the leading film archivists / historians of his generation, responsible for uncovering many previously-assumed Lost films. He was British (born in Yeovil) and worked in the publicity dept of Renown Pictures while still a teenager, beginning to write criticism and operating several local film societies prior to his emigration to the US (aged 21) in 1950. He started in Hollywood as a publicist for Monogram before going freelance in the same capacity, simultaneously dedicating himself (via his industry contacts) to acquiring and preserving old prints scheduled for dumping or destruction by the studios. In this way he amassed one of the most important (4,000+ titles) private collections in America which he regularly screened for fellow enthusiasts, becoming a respected academic authority in the process and writing about sixteen or so popular history books 1962-94. According to Kevin Brownlow: “…it would be no exaggeration to say he single-handedly transformed the attitude of American film enthusiasts towards early cinema”.
Classics of the Horror Film features a carefully-argued Introduction followed by 38 chronological chapters, mostly on individual films, though occasionally covering generic categories—The Silents / Two Ghost Classics / Vampires / Werewolves / Edgar Allan Poe / Madness / Old Houses / Hauntings and Possession—the last naturally ending with a bang-up-to-date assessment of The Exorcist. The most recent film to get a dedicated chapter of its own however is The Body Snatcher (1945), though Cat People’s write-up includes a detailed analysis of Night of the Demon (1958), the concluding paragraph of which is worth quoting in full: “[NotD] is undoubtedly a better (and more genuinely frightening) film than Cat People, and more importantly it is the last genuine horror ‘classic’ that we have had. In the sixteen years that have elapsed since it was made, one or two films have come close to it—most particularly Night of the Eagle—but none have quite equalled, let alone surpassed it. In time, it may well prove to be not only the apex, but the climax to the genre of ‘thinking’ horror films introduced by Val Lewton over a decade earlier”.
Thus, in Everson’s view even Night of the Demon is something of an abberation, since the true Classic era essentially dates from 1931-45. If he’d accordingly called his book “EARLY Classics of the Horror Film” all the subsequent controversy could have been avoided, but he didn’t, because he honestly believed nothing made in the ensuing thirty years was really much good. His inherent prejudices are baldly stated in the Introduction: “The horror film genre… has produced some magnificent films, but should have produced far more… the best horror films have always been those that relied more on suggestion than on outright statement…” and focuses on a film’s soundtrack as key to its success: “This is probably why the silent film was unable to create any really memorable horror films” making the extraordinary assertion that, when scared, girls “bury their heads in their hands” while boys “clasp their hands over their ears” (has ANYONE ever witnessed this remarkable phenomenon in operation?) Apparently the best moment in Theatre of Blood is the off-screen death of Eric Sykes “that one hears only over a walkie-talkie set”—by this point the reader is beginning to suspect that Everson really much prefers listening to the radio. A lengthy sequence of completely unsupported socio-historical generalisations is then accompanied by stills featuring captions like “Caltiki, the Immortal Monster (1960): Violence and sex substitute for style in typical assembly-line chiller of the 60s” or “Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965): a typical latterday (and far from classic) horror film, an omnibus of short stories with a concentration on blood and the physically repellent”. REALLY? Dr Terrors? It is hard to believe Everson has actually watched either film (with or without his hands clasped over his ears).
To be quite fair, the author is capable of thoughtfully balanced criticism—while inevitably disliking Hammer, he praises Peter Cushing as “an excellent actor [of] style, presence and even [in context] believability”—and, though utterly appalled by The Exorcist, is at least able to acknowledge its clever effects, and “creative use of colour and sound”. But his final assessment betrays his entire position: “It is perhaps a symptom of our unhealthy times that audiences flocked to see The Exorcist, wanting to be scared, INTENDING to scream, coming away haunted and sickened, yet somehow proud of having forced themselves to endure it”. It never seems to occur to Everson that he could have written exactly the same line about practically every genre blockbuster from Whale’s Frankenstein onwards. But of course the 30s weren’t “unhealthy times” were they?
21) HUTCHINSON Horror and Fantasy in the Cinema (156pp including Index)
Following the success of the Hamlyn and Octopus picture-books, Studio Vista got in on the act with their own “…and the Cinema” series of hardbacks edited by Sheridan Morley. These included Adventure and… by Ian Cameron, Romance and… by John Kobal, and, um, Erotic Movies by Richard Wortley. The series’ USP was that each volume contained a Foreword by a leading associated actor, Douglas Fairbanks Jr for Adventure and Deborah Kerr for Romance (no one seems to have wanted to lend their name to the Erotic volume, though Bardot pouts seductively from the cover). For Horror, Vincent Price contributes a witty intro, pointing out that he and his fellow genre-stars all share one notable pet hate: “our loathing of the term Horror Film”.
Hutchinson (1930-2005) was one of Britain’s most prolific film critics, arriving in London (from Sheffield) in 1956 and going on to work for the Sunday Telegraph, Mail on Sunday, Guardian and Radio Times amongst others, ending his career on his local paper the Ham & High. He wrote books on Marilyn Monroe (whom he interviewed in the 50s and claimed to have kissed) and Rod Steiger (who became a lifelong friend). His Horror compilation is (even compared with Frank & co) fairly text-light, featuring page after page of stills rather than much in-depth history or analysis. One oddity is that (presumably to try and add character) many of the illustrations are tinted fake-sepia, which has the unfortunate effect of making the book look rather cheap and tacky.
There are six chapters: The Celluloid Scream / The Monster Industry / Sex and the Vampire / Creature Symbols / The Machines Take Over / The Dark Stars. Hutchinson’s writing is conversational in tone, casually underlining his historical reach with quietly intelligent diversions into tangentially related topics, spiced with the occasional sharp insight and quirky personal observation. This was the first UK book to discuss The Exorcist (not released here until March ’74), and Hutchinson makes the interesting point that—for all its surface brilliance—the film’s underlying impact is arguably less upsetting than it might have been with a bit more restraint: “What it never projects, though, is the most horrifying thing of all—the death of the soul, the stripping of separate identity and individuality, which is what many real horror and science fiction movies attempt to analyse and warn us about…. The Exorcist, however nasty it looks and sounds… is really not horrific enough”. This was a considerably more measured and thoughtful response than most critics of the time were managing (as we have already seen).
22) BECK Heroes of the Horrors (354pp including Filmographies)
Calvin Thomas Beck (1929-1989) remains one of the most influential of the post-war fantasy (or ‘SFantasy’ as he later insisted on dubbing it) fan-turned-entrepreneurs, latterly best remembered for his groundbreaking Castle of Frankenstein magazine which managed an erratic (but now-revered) 26 issues between 1962-75. Beck started out organising a pen-pals correspondence club—The American Science-Fantasy Society—in 1948, then two years later launched a mimeographed fanzine with the unwieldy title Science and Science-Fantasy Fiction Review. By the mid-50s he was freelancing on pro-zines, but had ambitious ideas of his own—according to a 1981 interview: “A magazine devoted to SFantasy in the movies and on television seemed inevitable, if not slightly overdue—by 1957 I’d heard of several challenging things TV was planning and went ape on learning through the grapevine that Screen Gems had picked up the television rights to Universal Pictures’ earlier SFantasy films. Britain’s Hammer Films had also done a number on my head with Curse of Frankenstein…. I came up with dummy roughs for a magazine called Screen Wonder… but wasn’t surprised when [my existing publisher] turned down the whole idea. I quit and made the rounds of magazine distributors—one was Kable News which, by some odd coincidence, launched Famous Monsters of Filmland a few months later in 1958. By some even stranger coincidence, FM publisher Jim Warren and I bumped into one another the very same day I had my first conference up in Kable’s office…”
Beck thus carried a permanent semi-grudge that Warren had stolen his basic idea, though ANYONE with any nous would have seen the potential for such a magazine by late ’57. Either way, once Castle of Frankenstein belatedly debuted in 1962, its ongoing rivalry with FM helped to define 60s-70s fandom—as with the Beatles and the Stones, you could like one or the other, but not both. CoF was wittier, sharper, more political, with Beck often contributing scathing editorials about Vietnam etc, and simply facing down any readers who objected. He is (infamously) often now cited as a partial inspiration for Psycho’s Norman Bates—Bloch certainly knew Beck well, but (perhaps out of simple chivalry) never explicitly drew the connection himself. Others in the pair’s circle (including the already-mentioned Chris Steinbrunner) have been less reticent. Beck was apparently mercilessly dominated by an obsessively clingy, nagging mother (his much-loved father had died in 1964) who accompanied her son EVERYWHERE, and seems to have made much of his adult life a claustrophobic misery. Physical descriptions of Beck himself: “Overweight, very greasy-looking with a full, fat-cheeked face… black wavy hair that was very unattractive, and a moustache… always wore glasses… always unhealthy-looking…” certainly fit Bloch’s literary Norman to a tee.
Setting all this to one side, ongoing distribution-problems (combined with bigger literary ambitions) led to Beck abandoning CoF in the mid-70s to instead try writing his own books. Heroes of the Horrors is a simple but effective idea—to chart the golden age of Horror via detailed biographies of six of its greatest stars: the Chaneys (Sr & Jr), Lugosi, Karloff, Lorre and Price. These are book-ended by a characteristically witty and provocative ‘In Search of Imagination’ Preface—“And this is exactly what this entire genre is all about: IMAGINATION. As mankind’s only redeeming virtue, spell it in big fat capital letters if you please!”—followed by a terse decade-by-decade (1890-1969) Introduction to the genre, and closing with a two-page Epilogue briefly name-checking some of the 1970s highlights to date: “With this long-awaited synthesis of literate concepts and special-effects magic, plus the ever-increasing box-office receipts for fantastic films, the future holds promise of many wonders to come. The parlour-trickery of Melies has evolved into the artistry of visionaries”.
In other words, a key point about Heroes of the Horrors is that despite its deliberate retro-focus, Beck was most definitely NOT a conservative curmudgeon in the Gifford / Everson mould. He continued to be excited and impressed by new films up to his untimely death, and never retreated into nostalgia for its own sake. In 1978, three years after HotH, he produced a sequel—Scream Queens: Heroines of the Horrors—a much more diffuse work covering 29 separate actresses, many of them fairly obscure silent stars who only made one or two relevant films each. This, plus a rather dull focus on the post-Baby Jane careers of Crawford & Davis et al means that—despite occasional points of interest—it does not merit its own entry here.
23) NAHA Horrors From Screen to Scream (306pp)
One of the more accessible (and chunky) books in this sequence, Horrors FSTS takes the form of a simple double-column A-Z encyclopaedia of c.850 fantasy films (plus a few key stars and directors). The writing is folksy and sardonic, with most entries consisting of (skilful) capsule plot-summaries and a single sentence (sometimes single word) critical assessment. The length of the individual write-ups varies from a full page (Bride of Frankenstein) to a couple of lines (Son of Godzilla), and the nature of the format means the whole thing is engagingly readable, even if the frequently belligerent critical opinions are mixed to say the least.
Author Naha (b.1950) includes a brief autobiographical Introduction, explaining how the book grew out of obsessive childhood note-taking. After graduating from Kean University NJ, he worked as a freelance journalist writing rock and film pieces for Playboy, Village Voice and Rolling Stone etc before joining the A&R dept of Columbia Records. Horrors FSTS came about “because I was having a temper tantrum… one morning [at Columbia] I’d checked out what horror movies were on TV that week in the local television guide, and hit the roof—they had all the wrong information… I came into work furious, doing a Donald Duck rant about there not being any horror film reference books. One friend said “Why don’t you write one?”… I did a pitch-proposal with sample entries and stills, and my friend introduced me to a book agent who in turn sold it. All I had to do then was figure out how to write it. Fortunately I had my childhood going for me.”
Naha went on to write for Starlog and edit (under a pseudonym) the first issue of Fangoria. later turning out 25+ genre novels, and eventually even writing screenplays for Corman and Charles Band (eg Troll). Horrors FSTS is undeniable fun, though as noted its often wayward (not to say truculent) opinions can grate: Witchfinder General is “tasteless”, Curse of the Fly “forgettable”, Dance of the Vampires “amazingly dull”, Plague of the Zombies has a “minimal amount of shocks”, Quatermass and the Pit supposedly suffers from the absence of Brian Donlevy, and Son of Godzilla is simply “for the brain-damaged”. Charming.
24) SILVER The Vampire Film (238pp including Filmography, Bibliography and Index)
It seems likely that The Vampire Film appeared a month or two after Pattison’s Seal of Dracula, though the gap must have been very small as neither book mentions the other. Pattison’s effort is much the more light-heartedly readable, while Silver’s is in contrast deliberately (and ponderously) Academic. The writing is broadly ok, though occasionally rather windy (the Preface in particular is complete gobbledegook), and—despite superficially offering the longer analysis—over 40% of the page-count here is in fact comprised of appendices. Having said all that, The Vampire Film has been a notable long-term publishing success, with a fourth Revised edition appearing in 2011 (now opportunistically subtitled “From Nosferatu to True Blood”).
Co-authors Alain Silver and James Ursini have frequently worked as a team, both born in 1947 and graduating simultaneously from UCLA in 1975. They have co-written various books on topics including David Lean, Film Noir, Gangster Films etc, with their most recent (2014) collaboration being—surprise surprise—The Zombie Film. The Vampire Film features four chapters: Sources of the Vampire Lore in Film / The Male Vampire / The Female Vampire / Emerging Traditions [Hammer and Bava]. There is some welcome (indeed pioneering) thematic analysis of Tony Hinds’s Hammer scripts, though the authors typically can’t resist linking these to Ernest Jones’s 1931 Freudian opus ‘On the Nightmare’ (previously excerpted in Huss’s 1972 compendium), a book Hinds is very unlikely to have ever heard of, let alone actually read. But that’s academia for you.
25) DANIELS Living in Fear—A History of Horror in the Mass Media (248pp including Index)
Living in Fear is a borderline title for inclusion here, since—as the title indicates—it chronologically covers ALL aspects of Horror in popular culture (including literature, comics, TV, and even pop music), with the cinema not putting in an appearance until Chapter Six (p.118), almost halfway through. Additionally the page-count is further bulked out with seven reprinted short stories (by Poe, Bierce, MR James, Machen, Lovecraft, Brennan and Matheson), which jointly account for a further seventy pages by themselves. In this sense the book is reminiscent of Douglas’s original 1966 Horror!, but—despite these theoretical caveats—the scope of Daniels’ vision and depth of his insight (not to mention the general quality of his writing) combine to make Living in Fear essential reading for anyone wanting to put horror films into a broader cultural context.
Daniels (1943-2011) graduated from Brown University in Providence where he wrote his masters thesis on Frankenstein, later working as both a journalist and musician-composer (his bands variously included The Swamp Steppers and The Local Yokels). He penned half a dozen genre novels of his own including an ambitious series detailing the exploits of Spanish nobleman-vampire Don Sebastian De Villanueva, but is latterly best-remembered for Comix—A History of the Comic-Book in America (1971), a groundbreaking survey that mirrored Gifford’s contemporary UK work. Living in Fear comprises ten chapters: The Plague Years: A Background of Belief [Homer—Shakespeare] / Strawberry Hill: Gothic Ghosts [Walpole—Maturin] / Imps of the Perverse: Afraid in America [Poe—Hawthorne] / My Favourite Murder: Victorian Villainy [Bierce, Le Fanu, Stoker, Hodgson, James] / The Golden Dawn: a Secret Society [Machen, Blackwood, Rohmer] / The Silver Key: Mass Markets [Silent Cinema plus Lovecraft] / The Invisible Ray: Mass Media [Talkie Cinema up to 1948, plus Weird Tales and the Pulps) / Slime: the Retreat to Reality [EC comics plus 50s sci-fi] / Blood Sons: A Ruthless Revival [Hammer, AIP, Shock Theater, Famous Monsters, Matheson] / Heaven and Hell: Inner Space [pop music, underground comix, TV and 70s cinema]. The book ends with a shrewdly perceptive analysis of recent blockbusters Night of the Living Dead and The Exorcist, two films that (despite their wildly contrasting backgrounds) unmistakeably indicated the way forward for the genre.
26) BROSNAN The Horror People (304pp including Appendix and Index)
The Horror People is one of the most overlooked / forgotten books in this survey, a painful irony when it is by far one of the most important. Brosnan took the obvious (but previously unattempted) step of methodically interviewing all the major creative talents then specialising in the genre, to build up a collective sense of both the disparate personalities involved, and how they all felt about their (often overlapping) careers. This groundbreaking angle, combined with a thoughtfully insightful approach and refreshingly down-to-earth / direct prose style, makes The Horror People not just a consistent delight to read, but a genuine landmark of historical research.
John Brosnan (1947—2005) was born in Perth, Australia. writing film reviews for a variety of Oz magazines before moving to London in 1970 where he continued to pen both pulp fantasy-fiction (under a bewildering variety of collaborative pseudonyms) and critical journalism (for titles like Monster Mag and House of Hammer—his acerbic reviews for the latter have since become legendary). His first two books were James Bond in the Cinema (1972) and Movie Magic—the Story of Special Effects in the Cinema (1974), followed by about half-a-dozen others. Three of his twenty or so novels (1981—2004) were later filmed: Beyond Bedlam, Proteus and Carnosaur (the latter sardonically described by its author as “…crap, but INTERESTING crap”), and he also regularly (1988-91) scripted for 2000AD comic. In life, Brosnan was a depressive alcoholic (colleague Malcolm Edwards once deadpanned “he was very disciplined, writing in the mornings and drinking in the afternoons and evenings”), dying from acute pancreatitis at the wastefully young age of 57. But he leaves behind some of the most stimulating / incisive film criticism of his generation, and—compared with the majority of the other writers discussed in this survey—is quite frankly a revelation.
To support this contention, it is tempting to simply quote at length from relevant sections of The Horror People, though this is of course impractical. Here, nevertheless, is the opening paragraph of Brosnan’s typically brisk Introduction: “The horror film business is a strange cinematic phenomenon. By many in the film industry it is regarded as a sort of Sargasso Sea where the wrecks of second-rate actors and directors collect when they are no longer able to keep afloat in the more turbulent waters of the mainstream cinema, and many critics continue to dismiss horror films as mere fodder for the mentally under-developed. But in recent years a new generation of critics and film historians has come into being, and their assessment has moved to the opposite extreme—accompanied by a great deal of intellectual pretentiousness. Horror films have come to be regarded by this critical ‘new wave’ as important works that more accurately reflect the obsessions and tensions of society than their more serious, and respectable, counterparts. In some cases such claims are justifiable, but often it becomes ludicrous when all manner of complicated symbolism is read into a film that has obviously been designed as pure exploitation”.
Brosnan, in other words, chooses to tread the commonsense middle-line, taking the films seriously (with a frequently penetrating intelligence) without loading them down with spurious intellectualism. The results—particularly combined with a sharp, psychologically perceptive treatment of his interviewees—makes his book virtually unique in its field. The Horror People comprises fifteen chapters: The Chaneys / Lugosi and Karloff / The Men Behind the Early Monsters—Freund, Browning & Whale / Lewton and Company / Jack Arnold / Hammer / AIP and Corman / William Castle / Vincent Price / Christopher Lee / Peter Cushing / Writing Horror—Richard Matheson & Robert Bloch / Directing Horror—Freddie Francis and Roy Baker / Producing Horror—Milton Subotsky and Kevin Francis / The Horror Fans [Ackerman etc]. The first four chapters are (obviously) historical, while everyone from Jack Arnold onwards is a personal (and consistently revealing) interview. There is a three-page epilogue discussing the revitalising impact of The Exorcist (whilst also pointing out that all the contemporary fuss about it merely mirrors earlier fusses about earlier films), and a 25-page Appendix—’More Horror People’—containing fifty capsule-biographies of important contributors not discussed in the main text. The Horror People thus demands to be read by anyone with a serious interest in the genre, and—in particular—the men and women who actually created it.
27) FRANK Monsters and Vampires (160pp including Index)
Monsters and Vampires is Frank’s immediate follow-up to his highly successful Horror Movies of two years earlier, and is essentially more of the same (if it ain’t broke, why fix it?), once again combining Octopus’s plush production-values with the author’s breezy text and superlative choice of classily-presented stills. There are eight chapters—The First Vampires / Dracula is Born: Bela Lugosi / The Prince of Darkness: Christopher Lee / A Variety of Vampires / How to Make a Monster / The Beauty and the Beast / Monstrous Changes / Terror from Another World—with a notable focus on bang-up-to-date entries, including now-classic images from the likes of Warhol’s Frankenstein and Dracula pastiches, The Mutations, Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue and Legend of the Werewolf. Monsters and Vampires offers nothing new, but then doesn’t claim to, and—based on the pictures alone—still easily qualified as an essential purchase for British fans of the period.
28) DILLARD Horror Films (129pp including Filmography and Bibliography)
Dillard’s book is something of an oddity. It was part of the six-volume Monarch Film Studies series (other entries covered Ken Russell, Frederick Wiseman, King Vidor, Graphic Violence on the Screen, and Science Fiction Films), and only discusses four representative movies, one of which isn’t actually a traditional horror film at all. The intent behind this unusual approach becomes clearer once the author’s background is explained.
Richard Henry Wilde Dillard (b.1937) is an American poet, author and critic / translator with about fifteen books to his name (1966-2015) alongside a co-screenwriter credit on that well-known masterpiece Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965). He has taught creative writing, literature and film studies at Hollins University, Virginia since 1964, where (according to his Wikipedia entry) he is “considered something of an institution”, having “influenced many contemporary writers including both his ex-wives Annie Dillard and Cathryn Hankla”—the pair no doubt grateful for the input even if they jointly found him impossible to live with. Horror Films features four sequential chapters discussing Whale’s Frankenstein, The Wolfman, Night of the Living Dead and Satyricon in some depth, with a view to drawing out what Dillard sees as their key underlying philosophical themes.
Back in 1967 Dillard had contributed a short essay—Even a Man Who is Pure at Heart: Poetry and Danger in the Horror Film—to WR Robinson’s Man and the Movies collection, and “felt compelled to take an evangelical tone” in what was then a fairly fresh attempt to argue the genre deserved serious academic attention. Ten years later Dillard feels personally vindicated by the flood of books that have since appeared, modestly pointing this out in his Preface before moving on to an introductory essay—Drawing the Circle—discussing the “parabolic goals of the horror film” (presumably referring to their narrative rather than mathematical qualities, though he never bothers making this clear), and their associated ongoing “devolution of values”. A brief epilogue—The Circle Drawn—summarises his existential conclusions in this regard. In other words, Horror Films is a well-meaning but frequently pretentious analysis of the genre’s Big Themes, containing some interesting ideas consistently undermined by their author’s insistence on airily talking down to his readership. But once again, that’s academia for you.
29) DETTMAN The Horror Factory: the Horror Films of Universal 1931—1955 (193pp including Filmography and Bibliography)
There has to be a joker in every pack. The Horror Factory is an interesting entry in this sequence for all the wrong reasons, and is SO obscure (semi-professionally printed in what must have been a very limited edition) that the only attention it appears to have gained in forty years is an anonymous one-star 2011 Amazon review, which is worth selectively quoting: “There doesn’t seem to be a single Universal Horror movie that the creeps that wrote this book approve of…. All they do is criticize everything…. Basically someone’s term-papers from some snobby university that teaches you how to criticize but not how to actually do anything yourself…. These are the kind of guys you’d like to beat up in a bar, or better yet have the Wolf Man take care of (they’d be criticizing his makeup while getting their heads torn off). Skip this book. Bruce Dettman & Michael Bedford—go away.” This might seem somewhat harsh, but once you’ve read the work in question, you can’t help but find yourself nodding in agreement. It really is that bad.
The Horror Factory is part of the ‘Gordon Press Film Series’ which also included titles like Dickens and Film, Film Appreciation, Necrology of the Cinema, The Films of Delores Del Rio, and An Index to the Creative Work of DW Griffith. The publishers’ only other genre-entry seems to be AL Zambrano’s two-volume Horror in Film and Literature (1976), which—being an annotated checklist only—doesn’t appear in our current survey. Gordon Press are listed on The Horror Factory’s imprint-page solely via a (New York) P.O. Box No, and one immediate oddity of their book is that it hasn’t actually been typeset—what is presented is the authors’ original manuscript, complete with endless typos, strike-throughs and smudgily-tippexed hand-annotations. Even before you get onto the content, the result is a seriously tough read. As for authors Dettman and Bedford, virtually nothing can be gleaned about them. Dettman was born in 1950, and has fairly recently (2006-08) penned a series of online articles documenting 1950’s TV favourite The Adventures of Superman for a fan-website. That seems to be about it. He and Bedford had previously (1969) collaborated on ‘A Compendium of Canonical Weaponry’ a 33-page booklet of Sherlock Holmes trivia published in an edition of just 300 copies. It’s hard to believe The Horror Factory could have exceeded this total by much, and the book is now not easy to come by.
The Horror Factory is made up of ten chapters, each comprising about six or seven individual films: Prologue: Before Dracula / The Classics / Karloff and Lugosi: The Team / The End of One Era, the Beginning of Another / The Early Forties: Advent of the Programmers / The Continuing Story of the Famous Monsters / Two Series Failures: The Ape Woman and the Creeper / Other Films, Other Beasts / The Monsters Meet Abbott and Costello / Epilogue: From the Fifties to the Present. Despite the slightly misleading title (which might promote hopes of a Brosnan-style focus on Universal’s behind-the-scenes talent), what the book really amounts to is a personal critique of c.45 films. And—as the Amazon review above indicates—despite Introductory protestations to the contrary, the authors sniffily profess not to particularly rate ANY of them.
The problem with writing a book in your mid-twenties is that (unless you’re David Pirie, which this pair most definitely aren’t) your criticism is going to sound quite pathetically shrill. At least with the likes of Gifford and Everson, the reader can tell they honestly BELIEVED what they wrote. Dettman and Bedford in contrast enjoy being as rude as possible about everything simply because they think it makes them sound clever (rather than merely obnoxious). Such is their need to share their opinions on everything under the sun, they even make their bibliography a Bibliographic Survey in order to slag off half their predecessors: Butler is “Too self-consciously arty, with too little real substance”, Drake is “To be read, if it has to be read, with a total suspension of critical faculties”, while Frank is dismissed because: “With all the other broad outlines available (many of which are distinctly better-presented) this book is rather redundant”—this from a duo whose own effort isn’t even TYPESET. With what can only be described as quite breathtaking hypocrisy, they close by criticising Donald Willis’s exhaustive (1972) Checklist: “However, one would question if such a compilation is the proper place for the author’s often ill-considered little critiques appended to some of the entries” Oh, really? And has one looked in a mirror recently? That Amazon reviewer was right—after reading this, even Mahatma Gandhi himself would want to beat Dettman and Bedford up in a bar.
END OF PART 2