Although the back cover of Blood on Black Wax: Horror Soundtracks on Vinyl proclaims the book to be “long overdue,” I’d argue its timing couldn’t be better. As if the crush of hipsters on Record Store Day hasn’t clued you in, vinyl has made a startling, about-face comeback in this Spotify age, with limited pressings of fright-film soundtrack albums — from such niche labels as Death Waltz Recordings and Waxwork Records — among the most salivated-over collector’s items. Co-authors Aaron Lupton and Jeff Szpirglas take glorious advantage of this fan frenzy, striking while the iron is white-hot.

Following up the recent Ad Nauseam: Newsprint Nightmares from the 1980s, 1984 Publishing and Rue Morgue magazine collaborate again for a hardcover that is as much an objet d’art as the discs it celebrates, with color that pops off the page like so many zombies’ eyeballs. Although eschewing a countdown or list format, Lupton and Szpirglas spotlight one of roughly 200 slabs at a time, devoting no less than a full page to each.

Cover art is presented in a consistent span of left margin to right margin — look, Ma, no thumbnails! — with a brief article underneath reviewing the score and/or songs, giving background info and tracking the album’s release history. Some of the genre’s giants are interviewed about their compositions, most notably John Carpenter, but also Lalo Schifrin, Pino Donaggio, Henry Manfredini, Richard Band, Christopher Young and others.

You’ll find the expected classics, including John Williams’ Jaws and Bernard Hermann’s Psycho, but also cult favorites (Manfred Hübler and Siegfried Schwab’s Vampyros Lesbos), fresh cuts (Mica Levy’s Under the Skin), obscurities (Zdenek Liska’s The Cremator) and ungodly earworms (Robert Smith Jr. and Russ Huddleston’s Manos: The Hands of Fate). Contents are organized only by fairly broad categories, with the Goblin-strewn giallo earning special consideration.

The authors even go out of their way to invite a few choice compilations to the party, from Dick Jacobs and His Orchestra’s Themes from Horror Movies to the self-explanatory Bollywood Bloodbath: The B-Music of the Indian Horror Film Industry. Sporting a closing chapter on the current synthwave movement of faux soundtracks, the breadth of Blood on Black Wax’s curation is crazy impressive; the only platter I feel is sorely missing is Disasterpeace’s magnificent and moody It Follows soundscapes.

The turntable faithful and horror enthusiasts alike will treasure this book. Unlike many of the records featured, it won’t break the bank. —Rod Lott

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Teen Movie Hell, if released 20 or so years ago, would desperately sit on my shelf next to the various Psychotronics and Gore Scores, yellowing with useful age, pages dog-eared beyond belief. Sadly, it’s not 20 or so years ago, so this read — and what a great read it is — and its collection of movie reviews is mostly superfluous in the age of the internet.

Good thing that I — and mostly middle-aged shut-ins like me — still have those Psychotronics and Gore Scores in their bookcases, a little less used but still ultimately revered, and am still able to find a spot on the shelf for Mike “McBeardo” McPadden’s latest tome, even if its re-readability is strained in this modern day and age.

Still, McPadden does a good job of capturing those youthful urges and rejected dirges to see little darlings, party animals and bikini carwashes in their natural environment of toplessness, surrounded with plenty of suds — of both the beer and bathing variety — as a fat guy belly-flops into a pool while a dog with sunglasses covers his head in disbelief.

Dissecting the lesser-known trash — Computer Beach Party and Hamburger: The Motion Picture, for example — alongside the well-known flicks the cool kids favored — The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink ring a bell? — as well as a couple of questionable-but-welcome entries (including Police Academy, this former teen’s favorite) — Teen Movie Hell is definitely is a must-have for anyone with a nostalgic bent that begins in their pants and doesn’t go much further.

Enjoy your home on my shelf next to this stack of Re/Search books. —Louis Fowler

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Beginning with the oft-told anecdote of director Tobe Hooper fantasizing about crowd control via a certain gasoline-powered tool during a hectic holiday rush at Montgomery Ward (and thus planting the seeds that soon sprouted into an eventual horror classic), Joseph Lanza’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Film That Terrified a Rattled Nation is hardly the first nonfiction book about the 1974 movie. It is, however, a unique one. Lanza treads territory that prior TCM texts simply weren’t interested in exploring: the film as a result of American’s turbulent, troubled times. Those days were wrought with immense societal upheaval and disruption that arguably strengthened the movie’s effectiveness in striking chords and stirring up as much shit as it scared out of audience members.

In examining how the “post-’60s version of Hansel and Gretel” was shaped by the country’s mood at the time, the author does so more or less scene by scene, placing each chapter against a different aspect that was in the air: for example, the astrology craze, the dangers of hitchhiking, a nationwide beef shortage, the rise of porno chic, the birth of the serial killer. It’s a fascinating approach to considering a famous film, and an introductory page listing a “supporting cast” hints at the book’s depth and breadth: Johnny Carson, Richard M. Nixon, Alice Cooper, Linda Lovelace, the Zodiac Killer and the Ray Conniff Singers among them. But those just scratch the surface; among those unlisted but who come into play as the pages turn include Cormac McCarthy, Patty Hearst, Edmund Kemper, Charlie Chan, Barney Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Jim Jones, the NRA and the Loud family.

Lanza brings the same incisiveness he has to his previous subjects (from enfant terrible Ken Russell to ear-terrorizing elevator music), leaving us with a whip-smart whipcrack of a read: a mix of “making of,” film criticism, true crime, pop culture history, sociology and a historical zip through the zeitgeist during an era of pivotal uncertainty, when Americans went looking for the America they once knew … and found it dangling from a meathook. —Rod Lott

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While I am old enough to remember true double features being advertised, I unfortunately am young enough to never have had the good fortune to attend. By “true,” I borrow the criteria used by author Bryan Senn, referring to studios’ or distributors’ intentional pairings, rather than those at the whim of a theater owner or two-for-one reissues. This keeps his book on the subject, “Twice the Thrills! Twice the Chills!”, at a manageable length. So does limiting coverage to the genres and date range set by the book’s subtitle, Horror and Science Fiction Double Features, 1955-1974. Mind you, even with those filters in place, the contents make up yet a still whoppin’ 430-ish pages.

As he did with such previous works as The Most Dangerous Cinema and The Werewolf Filmography, Senn takes a focused look at a niche corner of cult movies and leaves no set of sprockets unchecked. Following an enlightening introduction of how and why the double feature came to be, he takes the reader on a chronological tour of presumably ever cinematic twofer, 147 in all. He not only reviews each picture individually, but even how well the films meshed — or mismatched, “like a schnitzel taco.”

As always, his reviews are as thorough and informed as they are entertaining. While the McFarland & Company book more than delivers as film criticism, I find “Twice the Thrills! Twice the Chills!” to be more valuable as a historical document on two fronts, appropriately enough. The first is simply in preserving the memories of Hollywood’s now-abandoned practice as generously illustrated through movie posters, newspaper ad mats and PR ballyhoo. If the posters and ads are a treat (and they are), perhaps best represented by the conjoining on the book’s cover (the iconic grindhouse one-two gut punch of I Eat Your Skin and I Drink Your Blood), the latter is even more so, represented with such images of such get-’em-in-the-door gimmicks as “zombie eyes” for Plague of the Zombies and a Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake kids’ mask.

The second front is in providing biographical sketches of — and subsequently saluting — largely unsung B-movie “heroes” like Teenagers from Outer Space auteur Tom Graeff (aka Jesus Christ II) or taxi driver Leonard Kirtman, whose double bill of Carnival of Blood and Curse of the Headless Horseman had to the most surreal experiences for theatergoers among all revisited in Senn’s worth-ever-penny wonder. —Rod Lott

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To cut right to the chase, as many skinflint movies of the studio in question did, any AIP fan is going to want to own Rob Craig’s American International Pictures: A Comprehensive Filmography, and their desire will not go unrewarded. Ignore the off-putting cover, because the hefty McFarland & Company paperback delivers the proverbial groceries, thereby earning that penultimate word of its subtitle.

In nearly 450 pages, more than 800 projects are discussed, whether AIP made the movie from scratch or merely picked it up for quick-buck distribution. Although the studio was known for biker, beach party, sword-and-sandal and Poe pictures, it also dealt in European spy thrillers and Mexican kiddie matinees, in kaiju and mondo, in Larry Buchanan and Larry Cohen, and even S-E-X, from Dagmar’s Hot Pants to Deadly Weapons.

I’ve been mixed on Gutter Auteur author Craig’s previous books on B movies, but with this behemoth, he’s done the Lord’s work. All but a scant few of the titles are reviewed in full, which is quite an undertaking when you think about it (and I do). While reading a paragraph that goes on for more than half a page can start to play tricks on your mind, at least his write-ups don’t waste time with rehashing the entire story; plot synopses are limited to a line or two, straight from the AIP pressbooks.

For every name familiar to film fans (Roger Corman, Jess Franco, K. Gordon Murray, Doris Wishman, etc.) are several who never got close to such status. The mark of this kind of movie guide is whether you’re exposed to titles you haven’t heard of, and that’s where Craig’s book pays off big, putting me on the hunt for Bring Me the Vampire, Slave Girls of Sheba, The Hong Kong Cat, The Wife Swappers and so many, many more.

In mining so deep, Craig occasionally shares an opinion so contrarian and aggressively, as if there were no room for debate, it seems calculated. For example, the Joan Collins vehicle The Devil Within Her is “far superior” to “the pompous, humorless Rosemary’s Baby,” while Dario Argento’s Suspiria is summarily dismissed outright as “that artfilm bore.” Of Ivan Reitman’s Cannibal Girls, he writes, “Hard to believe this was produced and directed by the same guy who bored us to tears a decade later with Ghostbusters.”

A book this colossal is bound to have a few errors, with perhaps the most egregious being three spellings of The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini starlet Deborah Walley (Wally, Whalley). Ditto a few miscalculations; Hallucination Generation’s Daniel Steinmann is noted for having moved from acting “to direct a very few obscure features,” which makes one wonder in which world is Paramount Pictures’ hit sequel Friday the 13th: A New Beginning considered obscure?

On the mitigating side, Craig does offer the most apt description of Al Adamson’s work I’ve run across yet (“the viewer is advised not to attempt to understand, but to experience”), as well as a standalone chapter on AIP’s ventures into television programming, which is so oddly fascinating, I gladly would have accepted a book on that, too. —Rod Lott

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