Forgotten Horrors to the Nth Degree

SNEAK PREVIEW: Here reposes the cover painting for our forthcoming Forgotten Horrors to the Nth Degree, collecting John Wooley's and my horror-movies columns from Fangoria magazine (since 2002) and combining those with assorted other rarities from our respective and collaborative projects over the long haul. The components add up to a survey of the often peculiar tangents the genre has taken since the 1960s -- starting with Blood Feast and 2K Maniacs and winding up with the Big Paradigm Shift of the 1980s, when the major studios finally usurped the role of the Poverty Row production companies and the video shakeout left the Old School Grindhouses in the lurch. Afterword by Stephen Bissette. Nice woik if yuh can get (away with) it...

Additional Forgotten Horrors News Just In:

Additional Forgotten Horrors news just in: And all thanx to Dennis King for the enthusiastic nod to the new edition of FORGOTTEN HORRORS (Vol. 1) at his Projections Movie Blog. Herewith: http://blog.newsok.com/projections/2012/07/19/forgotten-horrors-gets-new-life-with-revised-expanded-edition/

SHEENA, QUEEN OF THE JUNGLE -- ON STAGE

Perceptive review just in on Hip Pocket Theatre's SHEENA, QUEEN OF THE JUNGLE -- newly opened on the outdoor stage northwest of Fort Worth:
http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/08/11/4174757/jungle-queen-sheena-gets-respect.html

...and more about that at Facebook, at the Hip Pocket Theatre and Forgotten Horrors Podcast pages.

“Forgotten Horrors Vol. 2” Due in September -- if not Sooner

An expanded edition of Forgotten Horrors Vol. 2: Beyond the Horror Ban is in preparation for publication in September 2012 by Cremo Studios, Inc. The sequel to Michael H. Price and George E. Turner’s groundbreaking Forgotten Horrors: The Original Volume covers the development of the independent movie studios’ approach to horror, weird mystery, and science fiction during a period of banishment for the genre by the British and European boards of censorship.
“The notorious Horror Ban of the late 1930s accounted for some dark days in Hollywood,” says author Mike Price. “The British Board of Censors had been trying its level best since the late silent-era years to keep the creepier fare out of England, but the group had concentrated on individual titles, such as 1932’s Island of Lost Souls and Freaks, until a coalition developed with the European censors. The foreign market was lucrative enough for the Hollywood studios that this embargo had some teeth. Strange that the censors neglected to notice the moral lessons implicit in classic horror fiction, usually in a warning about ‘tampering with things man was meant to leave alone.’

“The ban lasted from 1936-1937 until well into 1939, when the genre enthusiasts had become sufficiently fed up to make a major hit out of the simple reissue of 1931’s Dracula and Frankenstein as a double feature,” adds Price. “Universal Pictures challenged the ban by reuniting Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi for the entirely new Son of Frankenstein in 1939, and the ban found itself broken.”

Forgotten Horrors Vol. 2 offers an in-depth study of how the prolific smaller studios made it through the ban and rallied in its wake. The new edition covers a stretch from 1938 through 1942, dovetailing with the recently published Forgotten Horrors: The Original Volume—Except More So. New light is directed onto Lugosi’s 10 starring features for the tiny studios of PRC Pictures and Monogram Pictures, Karloff’s series of Mr. Wong detective adventures, and an unusual series teaming Mantan Moreland and Frankie Darro as an integrated team of amateur detectives. Chapters new to this edition cover the haunted-house comedy Comes Midnight, the African expeditionary picture Dark Rapture, and a lowbrow wartime comedy, Hillbilly Blitzkrieg, that contains a surprising foreshadowing of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964).

A key chapter, “Beyond the Horror Ban,” relates the little-known tale of how one theatre in Beverly Hills provoked Universal Pictures to challenge the censors. The book also shows how subversive elements of terror and creepy mystery insinuated themselves into otherwise conventional films during the span of the ban.

Vol. 2 also unearths neglected items from the fabled Tyler, Texas, Black Film Collection at Southern Methodist University—Price was among the original discoverers of that trove of historic motion pictures—and resurrects forgotten performances by such celebrated figures of Old Hollywood as Peter Lorre, Dorothy Dandridge, and Franklyn Pangborn. The survey cuts across many distinct genres, from Westerns to comedies to crime thrillers and disaster pictures, all compiled from primary-source research and exclusive interviews.

The Foreword is by Josh Alan Friedman, the author of such books as Tell the Truth until They Bleed: Coming Clean in the Dirty World of Blues & Rock ’n’ Roll, and (with illustrator Drew Friedman) Any Similarity to Persons Living or Dead Is Purely Coincidental.

The Forgotten Horrors books, which originated in 1980, represent a benchmark in film scholarship and have been designated as Standard Desk References by the American Film Institute. Five volumes have been completed, with revisions and expansions in place on the first two books, refinements in progress on Vol. 3 and Vol. 4, and additional volumes in preparation. Price and the late George E. Turner originated the series as an offshoot of their research on behalf of the American Film Institute and the American Society of Cinematographers. Price and Turner also are responsible for such books as The Making of King Kong (Spawn of Skull Island) (1975-2002) and The Cinema of Adventure, Romance & Terror (1989).

Forgotten Horrors Vol. 2: Beyond the Horror Ban will carry a cover price of $30.

Forgotten Horrors: The Original Volume -- Except More So
Nothing like beating the deadline. Forgotten Horrors: The Original Volume will become available during the next few days at amazon.com and presently at www.oldies.com. Kindle edition in preparation. Thanx alot to everyone for the show of interest. The expansion and revision of Forgotten Horrors Vol. 2: Beyond the Horror Ban is in progress. Gathering files and reference reels meanwhile for a companion volume on Frontier Gothics -- Horrors on Horseback -- Phantoms of the Horse Opera -- Shoot-'em-Up Noir -- whatever one might call 'em. The next collection of Forgotten Horrors will jump the chronology into the 1960s-1980s as an anthology of John Wooley's and my columns (revised and expanded) for Fangoria magazine, dating from 2002.

Forgotten Horrors at Turner Classic Movies Website:

http://www.tcm.com/this-month/movie-news.html?id=494458&name=Forgotten-Horrors-The-Original-Volume-Except-More-So

Groundbreaking Movie Book “Forgotten Horrors” Returns to Its Roots for a Revised & Expanded Edition -- Due in August 2012

The publication in 1980 of Forgotten Horrors: Early Talkie Chillers from Poverty Row launched a new direction in film scholarship by subjecting the weirder movies of Old Hollywood’s low-rent district to the scholarly and critical attention customarily reserved for acknowledged classics from the big studios. Authors George E. Turner and Michael H. Price staked out a distinctive territory while rediscovering little-seen favorites and identifying early work from important stars-to-be and emerging major directors.

“We intended the title, Forgotten Horrors, to be a challenge—a self-denying prophecy,” says Mike Price in announcing a new edition, revised and expanded. “With very few exceptions, such as White Zombie and The Vampire Bat, these Depression-era pictures had been popularly forgotten through neglect, careless archiving, and inconsistent copyright maintenance. We sought to make them less ‘forgotten.’

“George and I covered more than 100 such films from 1929-1937 in the original edition, and within a few years of its publication many of these pictures started cropping up on the home-video market,” adds Price. “One large-scale video dealer went so far as to publish a catalogue called Forgotten Horrors. Mission accomplished.”

The new edition, Forgotten Horrors: The Original Volume—Except More So (Cremo Studios; $35), features many new chapters and an introduction by Mel Brooks—the filmmaker responsible for such horror pictures as Young Frankenstein and David Cronenberg’s The Fly. The expansion will serve both to unearth additional rarities and to restore much of the original manuscript. At the behest of the original publisher, the Tantivy Press of London, the authors had removed many chapters for the sake of brevity—including coverage of such significant independent films as Sam Goldwyn’s Bulldog Drummond and Harold Lloyd’s creepy comedy Welcome Danger, both from 1929. These and others have been restored to the text, along with many photographs and advertising images previously unpublished.

A key new discovery is a lost film by acclaimed director Edgar G. Ulmer, The Warning Shadow—made shortly before Ulmer’s big-time breakthrough with the Boris Karloff-Bela Lugosi starrer The Black Cat (1934). While The Warning Shadow remains a missing film, Price has traced its surviving footage to an unlikely location and reports accordingly on the find. More than 50 new chapters complete the package, ranging from weird Westerns to ghostly crime melodramas and offbeat comedies. The book’s 370 pages cover the rise of such iconic stars as Boris Karloff, Ginger Rogers, and Gene Autry; the decline of many silent-era talents who stuck around through the arrival of talking pictures in the late 1920s; and significant relationships between such major studios as Columbia and Universal and low-budget companies including Tiffany, Majestic, Victory, and Monogram.

Michael H. Price and the late George Turner, longtime editor of American Cinematographer magazine, also are responsible for such books as The Making of King Kong (Spawn of Skull Island) (1975-2002); Forgotten Horrors Vol. 2 (2001); and The Cinema of Adventure, Romance & Terror (1989). Price also has delivered Vols. 3-5 of the Forgotten Horrors series in collaboration with genre historians John Wooley and Jan Alan Henderson. A collection of Price’s film reviews for the New York Times News Service (1985-1998) is in preparation.

Forgotten Horrors: The Original Volume—Except More So will be issued in August of 2012 by Cremo Studios, Inc.