Hemlock Books

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.

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.

The Life & Films of Vincent Price

In 1953, Vincent Price adopted the mantle of the macabre which had been left vacant by Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff to play a deranged sculptor in House of Wax. He became the face of film fright for a generation of moviegoers. For more than twenty years afterwards, Price embodied the spirit of the Hollywood horror film in almost 60 features, from House on Haunted Hill and House of Usher in the 1950s to Witchfinder General and The Abominable Dr Phibes in the 1960s and ’70s.
Merchant of Menace is a celebration of this legendary actor’s remarkable life and work; it covers the entirety of Vincent Price’s film career with a wealth of fascinating detail and explains why, to many fans of the genre during the 1960s, Vincent Leonard Price was the horror film.

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 name of Hammer has long been synonymous with horror, but the legendary British film company was also responsible for some of the best fantasy and science fiction films made in the UK. From the terrors of The Quatermass Xperiment through the prehistoric menace of One Million Years BC to the prophetic satire of Moon Zero Two, Hammer put every bit as much style and creativity (and more money) into its fantasy features as it did into its Gothic horrors. In Hammer Fantasy & Sci-Fi, Bruce G Hallenbeck explores the history of Hammer s many ventures into science-fantasy, setting them in the context of the genre as a whole and providing the reader with a wealth of intriguing background detail, as well as dozens of rare photos from private collections.

268pp plus 8pp in colour.

New British Horror Cinema
1997-2008

Urban Terrors is the first book to fully examine the British horror film revival, documenting and analysing the more than 100 movies that were commercially released between 1997 and 2008. It reveals how the changes in technology have enabled more people to make films, how changes in distribution - from VHS to DVD to VOD - are enabling more people to watch them, and how the mainstream media has failed to spot and comment upon this largely-undocumented phenomenon. And it examines how these new kinds of horror films have dealt with issues like disenfranchised youth, class division and social exclusion...

294pp plus 8pp in colour. Fully illustrated throughout.

The World's Scariest Ever Movies
David Tappenden

80 Movies to Watch with Your Eyes Shut! From Psycho to Paranormal Activity and everything between they're all here: Night of the Living Dead, The Exorcist, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Jaws, Halloween, Alien, The Evil Dead, The Thing, Hellraiser, Scream, Ring, The Blair Witch Project, Wolf Creek, Saw, The Descent, Eden Lake and more plus some that you might not have heard of but which scared the pants off those who did encounter them! Do NOT read this book alone!!

Large format with over 300 rare stills. 260pp. Fully illustrated throughout.

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.

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’.