Books of Evil

My folks must have been concerned when

they saw these on my childhood bookshelf

If you've been following my blog since the beginning, you know I've a fondness for tales of the macabre, the spooky, the dark, the creepy, the terrifying, the horrible. While I'm not a big reader of horror fiction - though I used to love Stephen King's earlier work and the odd other thing - I have always loved scary cinema. 

Ever since I was a youngster, I gravitated toward the ghosts and monsters on TV. The old Abbott and Costello movies introduced me to several of the most famous monsters of all: Dracula, Wolfman, and Frankenstein's monster - and they did so with a chuckle. Another favourite scary comedy of mine as a child was The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, starring the ever nervous Don Knotts. Man, all I have to do is picture his face and I crack up.

Guides, fact books, & a cherished Karloff bio

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I began at an early age collecting books about horror movies both famous and obscure. I learned a lot about films that I had seen, ones that I wouldn't view until decades later, as well as ones that I've yet to see. It's fascinating to read about how the directors, writers, actors, make-up artists (the whole production crew, really) put together such unsettling movies. And since I was a young lad in the pre-internet and pre-home video days, my book collection provided me with pages of photos from all of those movies to pore over at my leisure. This was as good as it got back then.

A Frankenstein book I've yet to read, plus more guides to the genre

I'm not too fussy about my horror, though I do have a couple of personal rules: first, zombie flicks generally bore me to tears - I am just not into them, with a very few exceptions (White Zombie, I Walked With a Zombie, and maybe the original Night of the Living Dead); second, I'm pretty picky about horror after the 80's. This may outrage some other lovers of the genre, who might claim some of the best horror was produced in recent decades. But I'd beg to differ. I have very rarely found something I really liked from the 90's and 2000's. I try to give the more promising-looking movies a chance, but I often give many of those a miss. Eventually I will get to the most talked about films of recent years. For instance, I was impressed with The Conjuring, You're Next, Let the Right One In, and The Descent (among others). 

My movie collection goes back as far as 1920's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, followed by 1922's Nosferatu, 1923's Hunchback of Notre Dame, and a few others from that decade. I have and enjoy several of these silent pictures, including Lon Chaney Sr's Phantom of the Opera - one of my faves of all time.

The 1930's spawned the best known fright films of all, Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Mummy. Scads of pictures flowed out of the Hollywood system back in those days. many of them wonderful pieces of art, some of them not great but admirable, and plenty more that were utter dreck (but even those were sometimes interesting as curiosities). 

The 40's saw sequels from the Frank, Drac and Mummy squad, but also introduced a furry Wolf Man to the masses. Lon Chaney Jr, as the Wolf Man, became my all-time favourite cinematic monster. Still is.... I wish I had one of those movie posters, but the prices are out of this world (over $300 just for a reprint!). Established actors like Lugosi, Karloff, and Chaney found roles in numerous films of varying quality during this decade. A director named Jacques Tourneur was responsible for several moody and visual striking atmospheric thrillers, the best being Cat People, Curse of the Cat People, and I Walked With a Zombie. Moving on, The Uninvited and The Dead of Night are a couple of personal favourites from this era. 

The genre took a bit of a downturn in the 50's, or was at least blended with sci-fi in order to appeal to the changing tastes of audiences. Films like The Thing From Another World and The Creature from the Black Lagoon were examples of that hybrid form done very successfully. Other standouts were Godzilla and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The Quatermass series from Britain injected a more sophisticated tone into the chilling tales. And of course, the UK's Hammer film studios released the first of their long running series of "remakes" of the 30's classic horrors. Hammer brought vivid colour, sex, and increased violence into the mix, basically amping up the Hollywood formula but also delivering some wonderful creative work. A non-Hammer fave of mine from the 50's was Curse of the Demon, by Tourneur again, who'd honed his directing skills to a razor's edge by this time. Oh, and we can't forget about one of the biggest of the SF/horror genre, The Fly. "Help me, help me!"

In the swinging 60's, Hammer studios dominated with their often lurid tales of evil (one of my faves is Curse of the Werewolf). But films like The Haunting and The Innocents brought brilliant literary adaptations to the silver screen. Psycho and Eyes Without a Face were top-notch works, the first from the famous Hitchcock, and the second was perhaps overlooked for years due to its disturbing and graphic nature. Roger Corman directed a whole wack of horrors, both grim and comedic... among his best were Little Shop of Horrors and a cavalcade of loose Poe adaptations, including House of Usher. And I do mean loose. On another note, Burn Witch Burn is a fun and creepy film, among my preferences from the decade. 

That's it for today, kids.... I'll talk about some 70's horror in an upcoming post. 

Better keep the lights on tonight!