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Five Books That Shook My World

One of the chilling facts of our own mortality is the very small number of books that can be read in a lifetime. At the rate of a book a week (a pace that I can never long maintain), I would get through less than 4,000 books in my allotted years. At a book a month (moreorless my usual pace), I’ll finish less than a 1,000.  That’s only a small fraction of the new titles published in a single year, and a miniscule dent in all the books available.

As often as not, the books that I read are histories or commentaries on old horror movies.  One of the reasons that I will read fewer books than I might is that most of these surveys of horror are something less than page turners.  I have been reading such books now for almost 40 years, and there are five which for me were turning points, which changed the way that I looked at my favorite movies.

The first hardcover book that I ever bought was William K. Everson’s The Bad Guys – A Pictorial History of Movie Villains, published in 1964.  Soupy Sales, host of a kid’s show on TV and most famous for getting pies in the face, stopped the on-air mayhem one afternoon, and lovingly leafed through the book as he talked about the movies described in it. My hometown in suburban New Jersey did not have a bookstore, and I had yet to enter a real bookstore. That opportunity came a short time later on a class trip to New York City.  The school bus made a stop: I forget where or why, but there was a bookstore and it stocked The Bad Guys at $4.95.  I spent that afternoon reading it on a park bench in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty.  The statue is on a small island, and we school kids had more freedom to roam there than we might have been allowed on Manhattan.  No teacher hassled me as I wondered away to read Everson’s chapters on monsters and mad doctors.

Those chapters today seem a rather slight effort. The Bad Guys is a truly a pictorial history: 80% of its 200 or so pages are movie stills.  The total amount of text devoted to 1930s and 1940s horrors is only slightly longer than this essay.  Everson’s book contained few facts that had not been already published many times in Famous Monsters and the other monster magazines.  Those magazines aimed primarily at a pre-teen readership, a demographic that I was already outgrowing (though I continued to be a loyal reader until one-by-one they bit the dust).  Everson wrote for people like himself, in whom fandom and scholarship lived in happy harmony.  I saw in The Bad Guys that one could grow up and not leave his favorite movies behind.

A few years later came Carlos Clarens’ An Illustrated History of the Horror Film.  My love of old monster movies was no secret, and one of my high school teachers showed me a review in Newsweek. Still no bookstore in North Arlington, New Jersey; so I wrote to G. P. Putnam & Sons asking about it.  A copy came with an invoice a week later. This was the first bill that I had ever received in the mail; the first time any business had extended me credit, and the first that I had ever received something in the mail that I had not ordered. I  sent off a money order for $6.93 (no one in my family had a checking account until the 1970s).  I thought Clarens’ book a great one; I would have been even more impressed had I realized how young he was.  Not until Clarens’ early death did I learn that he was not all that much older than me. The so-called illustrated history is, by the standards of 1960s film books, not heavily burdened with photos: 48 glossy pages of stills and 171 pages of uninterrupted text.. Clarens’ traces horror and fantasy through the history of the cinema through 1965.  Modern devotees of the genres will have read by now many similar versions of this history. But Clarens’ prospective remains as fresh as ever, and anticipates by a quarter century the prevailing tone of current genre writings (from his introduction):

The landscape of the mind does not always correspond to external circumstance… There seems to be inside us a constant, ever-present yearning for the fantastic, for the darkly mysterious…Everything horrible has been swallowed up by the unconscious—that swamp of self-dread from which there emerge many ambiguous manifestations of itself.  And these are the black arts of the day…The classic American horror films of the thirties began to appear on television almost a decade ago. Things that had made us shiver 30 years ago had lost their power to horrify; yet they now emerged as myths, more powerful than ever before…

Clarens may have been the first—at least in English and in hardcover—to write about movie horror in such terms, but he was not alone.  A modest paperback already in the stores when Clarens’ history appeared was Classics of the Film, a collection of essays by members of the Wisconsin Film Society.  A reviewer praised it as “deliberately controversial”—for many reasons, perhaps one of them that Bela Lugosi and White Zombie rated as much coverage as the recognized masterpieces of world cinema.  The writer of those essays, as well as equally fine ones in the book on silent film, was Arthur Lennig. 

In 1974 came Lennig’s full length biography, The Count – The Life & Films of Bela ‘Dracula’ Lugosi.  Most Lugosi scholarship was as yet unborn. The massive amount of research into Lugosi’s life—finding and interviewing old co-workers, unearthing forgotten facts and documents, tracking all his travels and public appearances—lie in the future. Lennig, like one of Lugosi’s mad doctors, was utterly on his own. His book was a lifetime labor of love, which brought him from Hungary to Hollywood on the trail of a man who took pains to keep his life private and his past obscure.   A reader today of this first edition of Lennig’s Lugosi-biography may find it rather light on hard data, but in 1974 it was far more comprehensive than any tale not only of Lugosi, but of any horror star..  In 2003 Lennig published his revised version as The Immortal Court, incorporating the Lugosi fact-finding that his first version did much to inspire. The Immortal Count is the thorough, indispensable reference; but the shorter, less formal The Count captures Lennig’s love of his subject equally well.

About the time that The Count appeared, the number of new books on movie horror really started to grow.  These included biographies, genre histories, critical overviews, and by the 1980s, analyses of what the monster myths represented. Horror fiction and movies offer such a rich body of images and themes that they can be made to fit almost any interpretation, be it psychological, sociological, political or spiritual.  And they were, in such titles as Attack of the Leading Ladies!, The Beast Within, Dark Romance, The Dread of Difference, Horror & the Holy, Monsters in the Closet, The Monstrous-Feminine, The Movies On Your Mind, The Philosophy of Horror, Powers of Horror, Rational Fears, and The Thrill of Fear.

That list includes some of the books that I most admire, and some that I sadly do not. As a rule, the ones that most difficult to get into are not worth the effort.  An exception is one of the first interpretative analyses that I read and still one of the best, James Twitchell’s Dreadful Pleasures – An Anatomy of Modern Horror.  Twitchell grabs his readers in a short preface:

Over the past two centuries we see that certain images and sequences have plagued popular culture.  Surely it must be important that these motifs won’t go away… Whatever first directed our attention toward the macabre, …no amount of repetition, exploitation or censorship can dislodge it…Horror sequences are really formulaic rituals coded with precise social information needed by the adolescent audience.  Like fairy tales that prepare the child for the anxieties of separation, modern horror myths prepare the teenager for the anxieties of reproduction.”

That auspicious beginning is followed by a meandering 97 page chapter, that veers from art to literature to history to prehistory. At last on page 105, Twitchell gets back to his thesis, and thereafter the book is a wild ride for 200 pages, as each of the classic monsters is portrayed in terms of “the anxieties of reproduction.” Dracula is unholy intercourse; Frankenstein unholy procreation, Jekyll & Hyde unholy repression, The Wolf Man unholy pubescence:

Dr. Jekyll must depend on his libidinous double Mr. Hyde to cross forbidden boundaries.  So what is the boundary that Larry Talbot can’t cross but the Wolf Man can?…He has probably had a better life as a monster than he would have had as a man.  But he has to die for it.

Always lurking in the background is incest, which Twitchell sees at the core on the perennial horror tales.  For years after reading Twitchell’s book I was an adherent to his ideas. Eventually I came of the opinion that “the anxieties of reproduction” are only one of the driving forces behind the attraction of old horrors to so many of my generation. 

Historical research on a level of Lennig’s and interpretative analysis on a par with Twitchell’s joined in David Skal’s masterwork, Hollywood Gothic – The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen. The narrative’s framework is historical, taking Count Dracula from Bram Stoker’s novel to F. W. Murnau’s classic Nosferatu (and Florence Stoker’s legal battle against it) to Hamilton Deane’s play to the Hollywood gothic promised in the title.  Skal’s research is stunning, but the reader learned on page1 that the book is not a typical Hollywood history:

Without knowing anything of the myth’s origins, most of us can recite without prompting the salient characteristics of the vampire…We have received this information by a curious cultural transfusion…on some psychological level it must reflect some kind of universal knowledge…This is not the first book written on the subject of “Dracula,” and it will not be the last.  But most treatments to date have largely ignored the fascinating history, now nearly a century old, of the men and women whose lives have become entangled in the myth’s peculiar power. “Dracula” has exerted an irresistible, and at times, Faustian attraction upon numerous individuals who used the ever-expanding dream-machinery of publishing, theatre, and film to exploit the story’s power.

Many fine books on horror films have been written—some by the same authors named above—and but for chance I might have named a different pantheon of those which most influenced me.  The five titles described above made the movies for me more meaningful, and more fun, and pointed me towards greater adventures by guiding my own research.  In one form or another, the five are still obtainable.  Clarens’ history has been republished under various titles; Lennig’s The Count has been expanded into “The Immortal Count.” An internet search should track down copies of all of them.