The Great Nostalgic Horror Movie Books, Part One

As a 14-year old kid, I grew up with my nose inside such marvellous books as Alan Frank's Horror Films, William K. Everson's Classics of the Horror Film, David Pirie's A Heritage of Horror, Jean-Marie Sabatier's astonishing Les Classiques du Cinéma Fantastique and the fabulous issues of the now near mythical French magazine Midi-Minuit Fantastique. Perusing through these books was, and still is, in a way as much fun as watching the movies themselves, and in those days, when  films were far more difficult to come by, these books were often the only evocation of these wondrous genre films. Long before I had seen Jacinto Molina's El Jorobado de la Morgue, I marvelled over Alan Frank's description of the famous sequence with the rats describing what the dedicated actor had gone through while shooting it. Many years before I got to watch Franco's Rote Lippen, i looked in awe at that gorgeous page-filling still in Sabatier's  comprehensive book...

One other such nostalgic treat is The Seal of Dracula by Barrie Pattison (Lorrimer Publishing, London, 1975). An absolutely amazing survey of the various movie vampires from the silent days to the mid 1970s, Pattison's book is filled with rare stunning stills to complement the always fun and interesting writing. There are some lovely chapters on the Italian and Spanish vampire, the later with a small but caring study of Jacinto Molina (Paul Naschy): "... the memory of scenes of genuine imagination. Some are strongly erotic like Helga Line hanging naked by the ankles to see the beheading of her demon lover at the start of El Espanto Surge de la Tumba ... or the dream of vampires in La Noche de Walpurgis." Being one of my earliest acquisitions, Pattison's book was also the first to get me acquainted with eroticism and nudity in the horror film, with its suggestive stills from movies like La Orgia Nocturna de los Vampiros and Il Plenilunio delle Vergine, and a truly fantastic and, certainly for a 14-year old, a quite mind-boggling chapter called "The Sex-Vampire". This chapter starts as a loving study of the films of Jean Rollin before focusing on  some of Jesus Franco's vampire efforts. It is interesting to note that David Pirie's wonderful 1977 book, The Vampire Cinema, contains a similar chapter of the same title.

Pattison's study also features a lenghty chapter, "The Saga of the Draculas," focusing on the specific Bram Stoker adaptions, with particular attention for Jesus Franco's El Conde Dracula (1970) and the Dan Curtis film from 1973. Further into the chapter, Pattison switches his attention to the various adaptations of Le Fanu's Carmilla. Also nicely evocative is the chapter called, "Lust, Blood and God," chronicling movie vampire lore and specifically the various ways by which vampires are battled and destroyed.

The writing may not be as deep or insightful as, say, Silver and Ursini's The Vampire Film or the aforementioned book by David Pirie, yet all the texts are truly evocative of the films and their atmospheres, while the wealth of stills and images nicely counterbalanced the sometimes smaller vignettes. Furthermore, nowhere apparent is that cynical, debasing attitude one so often finds in contemporary books on the genre, authors making themselves interesting with their so-called 'witty' style of writing, which always goes at the expense of the films they write about, not to mention the people reading it. They sure don't write like that anymore (°).

°  Well, to be honest, the nostalgia sometimes gets the better of me. One does occasionally manage to run into a really good recent, or fairly recent, book on the genre: Jonathan Rigby's English Gothic (and his similar book on Christopher Lee), Troy Howarth's The Haunted Worlds of Mario Bava and Tim Lucas's All the Colors of the Dark to name a few and let us not forget Lucas's brilliant The Video Watchdog, which often featured articles by such old-school writers as Gregory William Mank.