Here's the second and so far final edition (1993, after 1985) of one of the more impressive, if deeply flawed, reference/critical works in horror film; among the flaws is that the entries are unsigned, so that one can have the fun of trying to suss out if it was Kim Newman, Tom Milne, Paul Willeman, Julian Petley, Tim Pulleine or editor Hardy, or some combination, who are responsible for one opinionated entry or another. Another rests squarely with Hardy and his publishers and their editors: to make room for new content, two relatively minor films were dropped from this edition (albeit everyone who loves horror in my generation of USians has at least heard of Don't Look in the Basement), while all kinds of questionable inclusions (Sorority House Massacre, Three O'Clock High as examples from either end of the suspense film quality range featuring psychopaths) continue...and similarly quasi-relevant work (say, El Topo) is missing, or, like Kongo, only mentioned in the entry for a film it's closely related to, as in this case as a non-silent remake of West of Zanzibar. Less of a judgement call, the index is all but useless unless you know the title or the common alternate titles of a film they offer a primary entry for; it a title is only mentioned in the text of a primary entry, good luck finding it, as with Kongo. (They have cogent things to say about the most obvious horror and horror-related films of Ingmar Bergman, but no entry in the index for The Devil's Eye, or Wild Strawberries, with its notable nightmare-sequence beginning...which would be more forgivable without full entries for the likes of Fatal Attraction.) And, as almost everyone complains about this book, it's no dry simple compendium of facts, but an often self-contradictory repository of strong opinions; someone on staff really hates Robert Bloch's scripts (without noting how much they were meddled with by the likes of producer/directors William Castle and Milton Subotsky, which one would think might be the purview of a book such as this), while someone else makes a point of praising (justly, I'd agree) the likes of the mistitled (not by Bloch!) Torture Garden (someone presumably had a copy of Octave Mirbeau's novel kicking around the office). But in this enumeration of some of the faults of the book, I think you might be gathering some of the virtues: it's by no means a comprehensive account of all horror films made (it misses a whole lot of video-only items, including such cult gems as Trancers and Subspecies 2, while noting others as it occurs to them to do so; Japanese and some other east Asian horror filmographies are given a reasonably good representation, but hardly a thorough one, and Korean films--admittedly a booming business in the years since--hardly represented at all), it is in its nearly 500 oversized pages full of informed consideration of a wide range of horror film, including any number of obscurities that might be new to all but the most knowledgeable fan/scholar. It's the kind of book that lends itself to an online or at least hypertextual sequel, and is worth your attention if you come across it. I can see why it's fetching such large prices on the secondhand market. Thanks to Kate Laity for the gift. Meanwhile, David J. Skal's book is a charming example of what might even hold together better online, but would lose precisely its tactile gimmicks. Skal, who could write the text of this survey of vampires in popular culture in his sleep, has that rather deft (and non-automatic!) text augmented by even more illustration, all in full color when the original is, and with the kind of tipped-in paper ephemera that did so well for Griffin and Sabine and its sequels a decade or so back; as such, this must be, if not the most expensive book Whitman Publishing has ever attempted, then certainly the most elaborate I've seen. (It comes, in its conceit of being a true scrapbook, with an unattached male vampire face mask, as well as with postcards, film-strip-like photo arrays and more in pouches or taped onto the pages.) At 144 augmented pages, all but necessarily slipcased, it sure isn't a Big Little Book while certainly also being a rather fat big book, and given the number of copies available at the picked-over Borders stores I've been visiting, it probably didn't do well...like the Overlook/Horror originally priced at $50 (well, minus 5c and in 2008 rather than 1993 dollars), you can currently get one at a Borders so endowed for $3.75 (less if you have the discount card, which will no longer be honored after Sunday). Eminently worth the effort to take the look. A redux post from 2011. For more of Friday's Books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
I watched the documentary Halloweenvillelate Friday night, the 30th, taking notes on how enthusiastically Lambertville, NJ celebrates the holiday and which streets to visit. That exposure, plus what I found on the internet, assured us of a more entertaining adventure. Local Lambertville filmmaker/musicians Paul Kaye & Gary P. Cohen helmed the doc and they recruited actress Deborah Reed to narrate. She is known, with good reason, among cult film fans for her role in the legendary Troll 2 as the bespectacled queen of the goblins, vicious vegan monsters who convert hapless humans into greenery so they can be eaten.
Saturday, October 31, 2015
Though Saturday's temps never rose beyond the low sixties, the cheery sun was out all day and there wasn't much wind when sundown brought temperatures down to the upper forties and early fifties. I had on my clunky large ankle-cradling shoes, thick jeans, a multi-pocketed zipper up vest that had belonged to my father UNDER my oversized Hawaiian shirt and a large multipocketed black jacket (the heaviest of my lighter jackets, which in conjunction with the rest of them, probably adds up to a winter coat) so I was quite comfortable lumbering around two quaint towns Hallowe'en night: New Hope, PA, where we eventually ate and shopped, is separated from NJ's Lambertville by a sheet-metal automobile and pedestrian bridge that clanks as we walk over it...and we did lots of footwork. My cousin Joe and my buddy Jeff were dressed in traditional more serious winter outerwear. While killing time in New Hope, waiting for sundown, we ate at the Logan Inn--good, tasty food but too pricy for my comfort. We didn't encounter any scary phenomena, save for the bill, but ghosts would have certainly given us more bang for our buck if we had! Once it grew dusky, we packed our purchases of New Hope fudge and gourmet popcorn away, clanged back over the bridge, and re-entered the transformed Lambertville. I had switched the Christmas-decoration-festooned, guinea pig-sized rubber spider that I had been carrying (Nastassja Kinski once, gingerly, had patted it, its sole brush with celebrity) with the dog-sized rubber cockroach that I had decked out with a Santa cap, a pet sized Santa coat and Christmas mittens, plus a spiked collar and leash. The Christmas roach (as my cousin dubbed it), often evokes cringing revulsion in many onlookers once they realize what it is and I cradled it in one arm like Paris Hilton does her barking rat-dogs, jiggling it around for maximum jointed-leg-twitching effect. It did its magic Hallowe'en night, provoking much conversation and gasps.
Evidently, there are side streets of decorated houses and neat businesses, most of which we didn't have time to side-track down. But we did tour the most popular street in Lambertville, which the police close to automobile traffic for several hours Hallowe'en evening. Many residential and businesses owners decorate along that drag, with second and third stories featuring illuminated or moving figures against windows, things dangling out of the window frames, webs stretching from top floors down to their postage-stamp-sized front yards. I recognized some of the props as pop-up Hallowe'en store merchandise from the current season or previous years, but the owners often utilized them in ways that maximized their efficiency or modified them. There were plenty of created-from-scratch figures and scenarios, some I recognized from the Halloweenville documentary. I think I saw the one house where the owner made use of hooded, caped performers in expressionless golden masks--she confessed in the film that she had discovered that they disturbed visitors more than the more obvious monsters that she had once employed; the house front and yard looked familiar but I didn't see any masked figures doing odd rituals...they still might have been lurking about. Amid the concerts of ghostly noises some owners played, a ghoulish rock band pounded out classic dark rock tunes such as a track from the Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon. To accommodate the hundreds of trick 'r treaters (including parents, older siblings and many costumed pets, some in glow-in-the-dark outfits to prevent them from getting stepped on), many owners stocked BARREL LOADS of goodies. A significant portion of the revelers were costumed. We only saw a portion of them but some folks were pushing a huge enclosed transparent illuminated crib with their multiple monkey-garbed children, another family had their children in a huge carrier dressed like a waste management truck. A child too young to be watching or reading Watchmen was dressed as Rorschach. The most impressive spectacle of the evening had at least two strong adults operating an Imperial Walker the size of of a large bulky camel, complete with classic "Imperial March" theme playing in a loop. The four-legged costume didn't walk swiftly up the street but the crowds did part out of respect for it. [Unrelated to the documentary, except from the same year's festivities:]
This is the type of well-populated small-town Halloween celebration nostalgically envisioned by the movie Trick 'R Treat. I'm sure that the revelry could be juxtaposed with adventures down creepier parts of town where there are more shadows than people and among more rural patches in Lambertville; that was the geographical contrast mapped out by the Trick 'R Treat film and could be used as a template for Lambertville as well.
25th anniversary issue; source of "Ghost Hunt" Illustration by Lee Brown Coye
Please see below for the "Tuesday's" A/V, October Underappreciated Music, and Friday's "Forgotten" Books posts in that order...thanks to all contributors and all you readers (and viewers/auditors!) and happy Hallowe'en...
FFB: THE ANTHOLOGIES OF BETTY M. OWEN Betty M. Owen was an editor most visibly for Scholastic Book Services in the 1960s and '70s...and her most prolific contributions were of the horror and associated weird fiction anthologies she produced for Scholastic, along with some other compilations (her 1966 Christmas carol anthology, with fellow SBS anthologist Mary MacEwan, featured transcriptions/arrangements by none other than a relatively young Carla Bley) of more than passing interest, including a selection of Jack London's short work and two anthologies of fiction from the Scholastic Magazines young writers' contests. A lover of sf, as well, she produced one anthology of more or less purely science fiction content, albeit that was one I've never actually held or seen, as it appeared after I was out of the Scholastic Book Services' reach, for the most part (I was in highs school by then, and occasionally seeing their magazines in class, but for whatever reason we weren't getting the book offers). Perhaps notably, the most prominent book of hers not published by SBS is the critical survey Smorgasbord of Books: Titles Junior High Readers Relish. (Indices courtesy ISFDB.) Her first horror antho for SBS was:
A fine start, and indicative of her lack of any sort of "purism" among selections that were sfnal, more criminous, and otherwise not necessarily horror per se, though, for example, the Blackwood qualifies by any measure. As someone already having cut his teeth on the eclecticism of the Robert Arthur "Alfred Hitchcock" anthologies, this was not unwelcome.
This was the first I bought among her books, and it's one of the more dear to me, as it introduced me to Finney with what I still think of as one of his best stories, and generally hewed closely to its stated remit, featuring mostly, at least, true horror as I think of it (supernatural suspense fiction, essentially)...the Poe being one of the relatively few exceptions...also notable that while Owen had mixed mostly classic and relatively "slick" writers in her first book of the outre, she reached just a bit into the more "insider" work of the likes of Evans, Hughes and, still to some extent in 1969, Lovecraft. Though whether she read the Evans in William Sloane's Stories for Tomorrow or Zacherley's Midnight Stew would be a good question to ask if we had the opportunity.
Well, this is probably the best of her anthologies for Scholastic, and probably why I chose it (in 2009, how time escapes) as the only of her books I've covered so far previously among FFB selections. I believe this book, also the first of hers I read in a borrowed copy, introduced me to Lawrence, Calisher and Borges...don't know if also St. Clair and Highsmith, but quite possibly--I suspect I'd read both of them perhaps a bit earlier in Arthur's "Hitchcock" anthologies.
Publication:The Ghostmasters: Weird Stories by Famous Writers
This was the last of Owen's books I purchased as a youth, and by the time I found it, I'd already read the Bierce stories, and a couple of the Hearn and Le Fanu stories, but decided what the hell, let's see what the balance are like. It's an oddly budget-conscious and rather lazy-seeming antho, given it's devoted to three writers whose work was all firmly in the public domain, but perhaps the selections were very dear to Owen. This would also be the last anthology of macabre fiction she placed with SBS.
As noted, I've never owned a copy of this one, published by the time I was reading essentially only books published for adults, anyway, but it, too, is a rather neat collection of chestnuts and at least one obscure selection (the Hood, previously only in a William F. Nolan anthology) and one or two arguably so (though the Felsen had been anthologized by Groff Conklin after appearing in F&SF, and Felsen was reasonably well-known for his YA writing...the Abernathy being one of those stories that people who know the author's name at all tend to think of first). Clearly, SBS was hoping to cash in on some Star Wars/Close Encounters gravy...I wonder why Owen stopped at this point (SBS's notoriously low rates of pay?).
Below, some of Owen's other work for SBS:
1980s or later reprint.
selections from the Fitzgerald translation edited by Owen
Recently, I watched The Man Who Saw Frankenstein Cry, a swiftly-paced documentary on ham-fisted yet sincere monster-loving actor/writer/director Paul Naschy's life and career, with
from The Man Who Saw Frankenstein Cry
plenty of comment on the
prolific King of Spanish Horror Cinema from the likes of his wife and brood, as
well as director-turned-commentator John Landis, Mick Garris, the unflappable
Jack Taylor (a somnolent chap who squeezed many cult/exploitation/horror
film roles in between international vacations), Living Dead at the Manchester
Morgue director Jorge Grau, and many more, plus behind-the-scenes photos and
footage, film clips, etc. Highly recommended to the Naschy fan and general
Eurotrash scholars.
I've also recently caught the Brian Clemens' Thriller episode, "Screamer," featuring
Legend of Hell House andThe Innocents actress Pamela Franklin as an
imperiled American (!) in backwoods Britain (sadly, the winsome Franklin
suppressed her lovely British accent for the part and was saddled with an
unflattering 'do). Clemens was known for his clever scripting of The
Avengers and sundry twilight-era Hammer horrors but his 1970s UK Thriller anthology
show, which I've never previously seen, has taken plenty of heat over the years.
Clemens previously co-wrote and produced the suspenseful original
version of And Soon the Darkness, which also starred Franklin.
I've seen Slice and Dice, a clip-packed documentary about slasher films which
included footage from Michele Soavi's Stagefright, Mario Bava's Bay of
Blood and the black-gloved, straight razor-filled giallos that flooded the
market between them. The production runs through the expected slasher-film
antecedents: Psycho, Peeping Tom, the Italian gialli titles and Black Christmas, then
gleefully plunges into the genre proper. I've also watched From Romero To Rome,
another British doc charting the influence of the original Night of the Living
Dead, the rise of Spanish zombies with Tombs of the Blind Dead and Living Dead
at the Manchester Morgue (though they neglected the numerous Iberian Paul
Naschy movies that involved traditional or Romeroesque zombies), and the effect
of Dawn of the Dead and Lucio Fulci's Zombie Flesh Eaters on the genre; a
good sampling of subsequent Italian movies, including Fulci's increasingly
surreal oeuvre, are addressed by, among others, writer and cinema scholar Kim
Newman.
from Rewind This!
I've watched Rewind This!, one of several documentaries dedicated to the rise
and fall of the video market, which also includes the perspective of the
Japanese as well as, included in the DVD's "special features," bits on the
British Video Nasty debacle. This production should be pure nostalgia for many who read the Horror discussion lists (the psychological narcotic of nostalgia is a topic that
turns up in those special feature segments as well). Rewind This! dedicates a lot of
its running time to the horror and exploitation market, with veteran huckster
Charles Band and others chiming in; the makers of the documentary acknowledge
that the horror/exploitation market may not be the only points of interest for
the retro-video fans but they are some of the most visible.
I borrowed, rented and traded videotapes through the 1980s and much
of the '90s and only began purchasing them new late in that decade, at a time when the writing on their wall was
"Goodbye obsolete format, signed, DVD." During the first decade of the
21st century, I began picking among flea market vendors for a few videotape-only rarities
and even ordered VHS titles from online vendors, for those films not yet on DVD....
Meanwhile, David J. Skal's book is a charming example of what might even hold together better online, but would lose precisely its tactile gimmicks. Skal, who could write the text of this survey of vampires in popular culture in his sleep, has that rather deft (and non-automatic!) text augmented by even more illustration, all in full color when the original is, and with the kind of tipped-in paper ephemera that did so well for Griffin and Sabine and its sequels a decade or so back; as such, this must be, if not the most expensive book Whitman Publishing has ever attempted, then certainly the most elaborate I've seen. (It comes, in its conceit of being a true scrapbook, with an unattached male vampire face mask, as well as with postcards, film-strip-like photo arrays and more in pouches or taped onto the pages.) At 144 augmented pages, all but necessarily slipcased, it sure isn't a Big Little Book while certainly also being a rather fat big book, and given the number of copies available at the picked-over Borders stores I've been visiting, it probably didn't do well...like the Overlook/Horror originally priced at $50 (well, minus 5c and in 2008 rather than 1993 dollars), you can currently get one at a Borders so endowed for $3.75 (less if you have the discount card, which will no longer be honored after Sunday). Eminently worth the effort to take the look.
