Price - Famished Monsters of Filmland

From Mexico: Ladrn de Cadveres.

Vol. 7: Famished Monsters of
Filmland

Michael H. Price

WITH

John Wooley Jan Alan Henderson

C R E M O S T U D I O S L O W E R K L O P S T O K I A

ALSO BY

Michael H. Price & Accomplices
Forgotten Horrors ET SEQ. Forgotten Horrors Comics & Stories The Legendary Lydecker Brothers The Big Book of Biker Flicks

(with John Wooley)
...AND OTHERS TOO HUMOROUS TO MENTION

Cover & Interior Design: Cremo Studios, Inc.
Copr. 2015 Michael H. Price
Recommended video sources: VCI Video Alpha Video

Something Weird Video
Life Is a Movie DOT COM

Relevant Websites: www.johnwooley.com
www.srbissette.com
and the Forgotten Horrors Podcast

at Facebook and iTunes

Essential research derives from the work of George E. Turner and Michael H. Price during 19682000 on behalf of the American Film Institute Catalogue of Feature Films . The Forgotten Horrors books have been designated as Standard References by the American Film Institute.

In memory of Phil Hardy (19452014), and with grateful acknowledgments to: Gary D. Rhodes Josh Alan Friedman Tim Paxton Steve Felton Drew Friedman Stephen R. Bissette Jim Vance Barret Dr. Demento Hansen David Hickey Kerry Gammill Betsy Pepper Keith & Patrick Reardon Perry Buck Stewart Allan Turner David Colton Robert Tinnell Joey Hambrick Mark A. Nobles Todd Camp Doug Hopkins Paul Crawford Craig Yoe Tillmann Courth Jasper Bark Denis Kitchen the American Film Institute Turner Classic Movies Hoblitzelle Archive, Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin

Without limiting Any Rights reserved under the Copyright Registered Above, no part of This Publication may be reproduced, stored into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the Prior Written Permission of the Copyright Owners or the Publisher.

ISBN13: 9781507821121 EAN10: 1507821123

Frontispieces:
Ladrn de Cadveres
Famous Monsters, Issue No. 4

Foreword............... 13 Frontispiece: Your AllTime

Favorite Monsters....... 22
Half Human: The Story of the Abominable Snowman
My World Dies Screaming
Teenage Monster
The Bride and the Beast
Demoniac (Les Louves)..... 55
Attack of the Puppet People (Earth VS .) The Spider The Boy and the Pirates Tormented The Magic Sword
The Return of Dracula (The
The Woman Eater
Night of the Demon
El Atad del Vampiro
The Trollenberg Terror

1959

Misterios de Ultratumba
The Flesh and the Fiends

Behemoth, the Sea
Monster (The Giant
4D Man (Master of
Terror Is a Man
The Devils Hand (Devils
Night of the Ghouls
The Inevitable Sequel..... 280

WORDS TO THE FORE

From M ICHAEL H. P RICE

Famous Monsters of Filmland : I spotted Forrest J Ackermans audacious new magazine on the newsrack at Plains Boulevard Rexall, the neighborhood drugstore that I would visit every day on the way home from Margaret Wills Elementary School in Amarillo, Texas. What I was doing at Plains Rexall on that day in 1959 is a bit of a mystery, inasmuch as by that time the family had resettled on the opposite side of towna different grammar school, with two friendly drugstores within strolling distancebut I figure the stop must have had something to do with my fathers intention to move back to the West Side. Anyhow, Plains Rexall is where I noticed the magazine (Issue No. 4) depicted upon the facing page.

I scarcely needed any magazines devoted to make-believe monstrosities: An uncle in the movie-theatre business kept promotional kits dating all the way back to Dracula and Frankenstein the watershed titles of 1931and occasionally he would pick up a pictorial horror-stories pulp at the newsstand. These books paled by comparison with the movie kits, whose illustrated filefolders were crammed with 8-by-10-inch glossy photographs and poster reproductions and background information on the motion pictures.

Still and all, the newer publications exerted a forbidden appeal:

Still and all, the newer publications exerted a forbidden appeal: cent comic books during the middle 1950s; some of the publishers had retrenched in 25- and 35-cent magazines that fell outside the repressive province of the Comics Code Authority. My uncle, Grady L. Wilson, had purchased copies of Myron Fass Monster Parade and Shock Tales magazines, which proved concerned not so much with the movies chillers as with photo-illustrated schlock fantasies professing to portray the erotic inclinations of werewolves and vampires and suchlike.

The interest quickened upon the arrival of Famous Monsters of Filmland . This fourth issue, the first I had noticed, featured a Batrachian Whatzus on its covera Martian invader, as it turned out, from George Pals The War of the Worlds and covered films of the sort that had begun cropping up in 1957 via syndicated televisions weekly Shock! Theater , a showcase for Universal Pictures chillers and offbeat mysteries of the 1930s and 1940s. Famous Monsters delved deeper, what with such oddities as a skeletal menace from the silentscreen age. Editor Forrest J Ackerman was less interested in scholarship than in exhibiting rarities from his collection and indulging a taste for puns and puerile gee-whiz blathering. The photographs made the nonsense tolerable, and the subject matter was as certain to raise the parental hackles as Shock! Theater and the occasional copy of Tales from the Crypt or Voodoo comics (rendered extinct in a Congressional witchhunt of 1954) that would show up now and again at a neighborhood store called the Magazine Exchange.

The so-called Monster Boom of the 1950s was in early bloom. The commercial interest had transferred itself from the now-bland comicbook industry into the movies. New pictures in abundance matched the TV-reissue frenzy. Paramount Pictures deployed big-screen reissues of such Depression Era shockers as Island of Lost Souls and Dr. Cyclops . Bubble-gum trading cards, long devoted to sporting figures

and general-interest movie stars, began featuring monsters. Cheesecake pin-up images took on the trappings of Halloween, here, and science fiction, there (above). Halloween, for that matter, seemed to have become a year-round phenomenon.