Livres

In the early 1950s, the traditional American film industry was facing a crisis due to one thing: television. Two men from totally different backgrounds pooled their talents and tapped into the burgeoning ‘teenage’ market, and American International Pictures was born. Over the next 25 years, ‘AIP’ would turn out genre films of every kind, from sci-fi and horror to ‘beach party’ and Blaxploitation. Some of its titles have since become legendary - I Was a Teenage Werewolf, Horrors of the Black Museum, The Wild Angels - but the company also produced prestige pictures like Wuthering Heights and box-office bonanzas such as Love at First Bite and The Amityville Horror.

Author Matthew Coniam takes a fresh look at this most familiar of horror films with the aim of bringing it back to Undead life and to counter the accusations of staginess and anti-climax that have dogged it for 90 years. Through a detailed study of the film that makes much use of original research, he offers a new way of seeing Dracula that restores the urgency and excitement with which it was embraced by its original audiences.

182 pages, fully illustrated, 8 pages in colour.

TOD SLAUGHTER is the ‘missing link’ between the villains of melodrama of the Victorian popular theatre and the Gothic guignol of Hammer Horror. Slaughter’s Squire Corder, Sweeney Todd, Sir Percival Glyde and more were the gloating, grotesque forerunners of aristocratic Hammer villains such as Baron Frankenstein or Sir Hugo Baskerville. Now the full-length, definitive biography of Britain’s FIRST horror star is available in paperback exclusively at Hemlock Books.

Paperback, 280 pages, 8pp in colour, fully illustrated.

From the Blue Halls of the silent screen to the more famous Bray Studios, the history of Hammer was as rich and varied as that of the post-1957 period for which it is best known. Here, for the first time, is the whole story of the company - from its origins to the return to active production under the banner of Hammer after the war - abandoned in the downturn of the 1930s - and early attempts to break into the lucrative American market, to the informal tie-in with the British Broadcasting Corporation which eventually brought about the science fiction sensation of The Quatermass Xperiment and gave ‘X’-certificate audiences their first taste of ‘Hammer Horror’.

In 1957, Hammer released The Curse of Frankenstein and changed the face of horror cinema forever. Hammer Horror was born, and the film made international stars of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. In the years that followed, the company made six more Frankenstein films and a television pilot, all but two of them starring Cushing as the callous and amoral Baron Frankenstein–a very different character to that created by Mary Shelley in her 1818 novel. Author Bruce Hallenbeck explores in detail the many cinematic experiments of the baron who, along the way, made ‘Creatures’ of Lee, Don Megowan, Michael Gwynn, wrestler Kiwi Kingston, Susan Denberg, Freddie Jones and David Prowse in a series unique in the annals of British horror.

240pp plus 8pp in colour. Fully illustrated throughout.

Terror in the New Millennium

In Retro Screams, Christopher Koetting casts his eye over the biggest horror remakes of the past decade, and the iconic films that inspired them. By comparing each of them in turn, he examines whether this fad for ‘re-imagining’ the screen’s greatest terror triumphs is a worthy sub-genre in its own right...or simply evidence of the modern horror film’s lack of imagination...

392pp plus 8pp in colour. Fully illustrated throughout.

The Fantastic True Story of Roger Corman's New World Pictures Christopher T Koetting

The year is 1969. After making his hugely-successful series of Poe movies with Vincent Price, producer-director Roger Corman set up shop as New World Pictures. For the next thirteen years, Corman was the driving force behind some of the best-known fantasy and exploitation films of the 1970s and early '80s - while his company kicked off the careers of directors like James Cameron, Jonathan Demme and Ron Howard. Mind Warp chronicles the amazing history of Corman’s ‘New World’ – the films, the facts and the fantastic feats of budget ingenuity! The ultimate guide to drive-in thrills and chills at their best.

280pp plus 8pp in colour. Fully illustrated throughout.