The Pictorial History of Horror Movies

Yet another major influence on my life when I was a particularly brilliant and perceptive child was Denis Gifford's A Pictorial History of Horror Movies, first published in 1973.

A fellow student from my school had a copy and I remember me and my younger brother bicycling over to his house specifically to look through it. By then, Saturday afternoon's Creature Feature hosted by Dr. Paul Bearer had already introduced me to classic monster films, but there were still a lot of films I hadn't seen or didn't know about.

I managed to score my own copy not long after that--probably by whining about it to my parents until I broke their spirits and they bought me one.

It is an absolutely wonderful book, with hundreds of great pictures and a lot of insightful historical information and analysis of the genre. It was also written at just the right time--horror movies at that time were descending into the casual use of gore that would inevitably de-value the genre. So this book covered the good stuff and was able to stop at a point where things got mindlessly bloody. It is, simply by the benefit of when it was written, a book about the genre's true Golden Age.

As a kid, I think I appreciated the pictures, though I did read and learn stuff from the text. As an adult, I can more deeply appreciate Gifford's smooth prose and insightful comments. He understood the value of the genre and that understanding shines through in each chapter.

Here's an example of Gifford's intelligent analysis, in which he is talking about the look and design of the classic Universal monster movies:

"The settings were interchangeable, the ambiance unchangeable. This was the secret of the Universal universe. It gave the great films a continuity that was comforting to come back to, whatever the horror that walked abroad. Familiar faces, familiar places: a sort of security in a world of fear. It was easier to suspend belief when the impossible took place in a tight, false world of studio-built landscape, where every tree was carefully gnarled in expressionistic fright, every house cunningly gabled in Gothic mystery, every shadow beautifully-lit into lurking terror; and where every actor was caught in the closing ring of horrors, untouched by the possibility of a normal world beyond."

A Pictorial History of Horror Movies has not, sadly, been in print for years. But any fan of the genre would benefit from tracking down a copy.