"If the horror film had been
revived in the fifties, in the sixties
it flourished. In America, Roger Corman
began his series of adaptations of the
works of Edgar Allan Poe with the
magnificent House
of Usher
(1960), while films like Onibaba
a/k/a The
Demon
and Kwaidan
a/k/a Ghost
Story
(both 1964) revealed to the West the
violent Japanese horror tradition. In
Italy, Mario Bava commenced his
explorations of perverse sexuality with
the delirious La
Maschera del Demonio
a/k/a Black
Sunday
(1960), while in Spain, Jesus
Franco's gruesome Gritos
en la Noche
a/k/a The
Awful Dr. Orloff
(1962) initiated a stream of
similarly inclined medical-horror films
in which surgical dismemberment and
violence to women's bodies took the
place of sex, still the staple of the
vampire movies. This latter strand also
quickly surfaced, in pared down fashion,
in America in the 'splatter movies' of
Herschell Gordon Lewis, among others,
with Blood
Feast
(1963), the early examples of which,
in their own gory way, were as much
exercises in Grand Guignol as Whatever
Happened to Baby Jane
(1963) and its numerous
clones."
Any
horror movie fan worth their stones needs
this exhaustive volume of genre pictures.
Author Paul Willeman and contributors
Verina Glaessner, Julian Petley and Tim
Puelleine under the guiding hand of Phil
Hardy cover it all from the silent era to
the present -- and the present time in my
copy is around 1984, but it's been updated
several times and now ends somewhere in
the mid-90s.
What
sets this book apart from other
compendiums is it's extensive coverage of
films from outside the United States. (Hardy
is based in London.) Japanese ghost
stories, German impressionists, British
chillers, Mexican monstrosities and
Italian gore are all treated with an even
hand. (Hardy
is based in London.) Japanese ghost
stories, German impressionists, British
chillers, Mexican monstrosities and
Italian gore are all treated with an even
hand.
Wonderfully
illustrated with stills, publicity photos
and promotional materials, each film is
given a synopsis -- some brief, others
more expounded upon, but at no point do
you get a sense of any "bull-crit"
-- the bane of most reference guides. In
other words, they've actually seen the
majority of the films they're writing
about, and believe me, there's a ton of
them (over 1300 entries.)
Directors, producers, writers and cast are
also posted along with the production
company and total running time.
It's
amazing to see how the horror film evolved
from it's gothic origins to what it is
today. The book is laid out in
chronological order so you can also easily
see the ten year cycle of quality that
horror films have gone through since the
beginning. The IMDB
has stolen some thunder from this book but
it's still an essential read and a valued
Horror Film resource.
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