If, God forbid, you’re anything like me, upon seeing Ian Cooper’s The Manson Family on Film and Television, you might think, “Are there really that many movies about Charles Manson to merit a whole book?”

The short answer: No.

But if the scope were expanded to include those projects that were inspired by the Manson family’s reign of terror in the summer of 1969? Well, then my answer would be a resounding “yes!” And since that is what Cooper has done, that’s a “yes,” my children.

It’s a damn good book, too, on a subgenre about which you didn’t even know you wanted to read. With a blend of the historical and the critical, of course Cooper covers the 1976 TV miniseries Helter Skelter, still the definitive pic on the subject (so definitive it forever typecast star Steve Railsback as a loon), as well as the Oscar-nominated Manson documentary from ’73.

However, what makes the McFarland & Company paperback worth the price to cinephiles is the exhaustive coverage of the exploitation industry’s various entries into the thematically related sweepstakes (although, it should be noted, the book is not exploitative). The net spreads wider than one might think, from well-known cult classics like David E. Durston’s I Drink Your Blood, Michael Findlay’s Snuff and Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left to such lurid and languid obscurities as Wrong Way, Because of the Cats and the X-rated The Love-Thrill Murders, starring Troy Donahue.

To this day — and even tomorrow, with Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming Once Upon a Time in Hollywood set for 2019 — the Manson murders still inform and inspire entertainment, like the horror hit The Strangers and the wretched DTVer Wolves at the Door. From Kenneth Anger to Diane Sawyer, from animation to pornography, no cinematic piggy appears to have escaped Cooper’s probing pen. —Rod Lott

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Even Jess Franco himself likely never thought he would the subject of three books released in roughly a year’s time, and yet, here we are, with Kristofer Todd Upjohn’s Jess Franco: The World’s Most Dangerous Filmmaker released last January, Stephen Thrower’s Flowers of Perversion due come Valentine’s Day, and now Wayne State University Press’ The Films of Jess Franco in between.

Isn’t it a great time to be alive?

In 2013, Ian Olney delivered the fine Euro Horror, an accessible book with an academic bent, and his Films of Jess Franco could be a spin-off, as it takes a similar approach and flies off with that spirit. Olney and co-editor Antonio Lázaro-Reboll present their case of viewing Franco as an auteur, despite his “amorphousness” filmography and tending toward “spectacle and excess over unity and logic” working against him. I’ll be damned if they don’t convince.

Franco forever tiptoed through the tulips of genre — including crackling crime pictures, which Sex, Sadism, Spain, and Cinema author Nicholas G. Schlegel contributes a terrific essay on — but among the dozen pieces that follow, most concern themselves with his melding of sex and horror: “horrotica,” as Tatjana Pavlović dubs it. For example, Aurore Spiers draws comparisons between the vampire cinema of Franco and Jean Rollin (Zombie Lake, anyone?), while Andy Willis uses the arguable breakthrough Awful Dr. Orlof as a benchmark, and Finley Freibert dares to tackle the “Politics of Monotony” in the man’s dreadful DIY efforts (à la Mari-Cookie and the Killer Tarantula that formed the final chapter of the man’s career.

But all that is the expected route. Not as predictable — and, therefore, twice as engaging — are a pair of late-in-book essays, in which Xavier Mendik and Lázaro-Reboll respectively consider the postmortem cult of Franco muse Soledad Miranda and the role that zines like Thrower’s Eyeball and Tim Lucas’ Video Watchdog on championing Franco, if not outright fertilizing his brand-name status. —Rod Lott

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When Peter Stanfield publishes a book, it’s a cult cinephile’s cause for celebration. Having examined pop 1950 cinema and pulp fiction in past titles, also for Rutgers University Press, the UK film professor cranes his neck at Hoodlum Movies: Seriality and the Outlaw Biker Film Cycle, 1966-1972. Like so many other types of teenpics in which the likes of Roger Corman and Samuel Z. Arkoff specialized, the biker movie was short-lived and derided by critics; as Stanfield notes, “Repetitious, poorly made, and morally putrescent” was the name of the press’ repeated game. Only a few dozen were made, and fewer are remembered today, but he ticks through them snobbery-free, as if each one were an important piece of a time-capsule whole — and they are (which is rarely to be confused with “good”). Excepting a couple of instances of repetition (like the parentage of Nancy Sinatra, Peter Fonda, et al.), Stanfield revs up another winner. Outside of the woefully out-of-print Big Book of Biker Movies, this is the best work on the subgenre yet.

Die Hard. Predator. The Hunt for Red October. Federal prison. Okay, so you can’t win ’em all. But in the late 1980s, the gifted director John McTiernan was poised to become a Hollywood all-timer by knocking out three well-received smash hits in a row. Then Last Action Hero happened, and no amount of Die Hard sequels could save the rather precipitous slip of legal misfortune that followed. Arkansas-based freelancer Larry Taylor recounts every step in John McTiernan: The Rise and Fall of an Action Movie Icon, and while the McTiernan saga is interesting, Taylor’s book is a missed opportunity. Disappointingly, yet not surprisingly, Taylor was unable to interview McTiernan for the McFarland & Company release, so he relies on others’ previously published articles to build the narrative, sometimes straining for drama when the beats simply are not there. It reads like an extended press-kit bio with the occasional “huh, didn’t know that” kernel of info.

Part of Edinburgh University Press’ ReFocus series of essay collections on film auteurs, ReFocus: The Films of William Castle provides a dozen essays on the man who wanted to “scare the pants off America,” but also wound up in monster kids’ collective hearts. Castle became the Alfred Hitchcock of the B movies, but the book does not ignore his early career anonymously toiling in noir and Western programmers. Of course, once editor Murray Leeder and company turn their critical eye to Castle’s gimmick era — one of such matinee classics as The Tingler, The House on Haunted Hill, 13 Ghosts, etc. — is when it hits peak interest, and the book argues his ballyhoo can still be felt today in upsold-theatrical formats like IMAX. Additional chapters explore Castle’s role “playing” himself, how he played with gender at a time when it was decidedly not in vogue, and the line that can be drawn directly from him to John Waters. Texts on Castle are far from dime-a-dozen, so fans who take the filmmaker seriously owe it to themselves to get this. —Rod Lott

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Even if you’re not a fan of the 1974 parody Flesh Gordon (and I’m not), the autobiography of leading man Jason Williams makes for an eye-opening read on the member-raising adult film industry. In I Was Flesh Gordon: Fighting the Sex Ray and Other Adventures of an Accidental Porn Pioneer, the all-American Williams (with an assist from blogger Derek McCaw) shares how he went from near-starving actor to the titular role in an instantly infamous, X-rated mainstream hit … and yet remained just outside Hollywood’s periphery. Just as intriguing as his on-set remembrances are his at-home ones, when he tiptoed around how much he should (or should not) tell his then-girlfriend about his workday — in particular, the scene in which he was mounted by a German stranger who guided him inside her when they could have gotten away with, y’know, acting. Published by McFarland & Company, the slim and breezy volume loses steam toward the end, because Williams’ follow-up film, the 1976 pornographic musical version of Alice in Wonderland, has neither the wealth of juicy stories nor the cultural impact of Flesh. It’s this summer’s bio you didn’t know you wanted to read!

The only thing unsatisfying about People Only Die of Love in Movies: Film Writing by Jim Ridley is that the author isn’t around to see it. A longtime force of nature behind the influential alt-weekly Nashville Scene, Ridley was editor when he passed away unexpectedly in 2016; this Vanderbilt University Press hardback exists as a tribute and wasn’t in the planning stages during his lifetime, but it was bound to happen, posthumously or not, for one reason: The way he put words to page was — and is — the very definition of craft. For this collection, co-worker/close friend Steve Haruch assembled nearly 100 of Ridley’s reviews — a generously representative swath that includes a defense of Jackass, a pan of Schindler’s List and liner notes for the Criterion Collection’s release of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. My favorite piece, however, isn’t a review at all, but a long-form look back at the making and legacy of Robert Altman’s Nashville on the eve of the divisive classic’s 20th anniversary that makes a revisit immediately tempting, even if you were lukewarm on the picture. That he could do the same for works on as wide a range as Howard Hawks and Rob Zombie is indicative of his immense gift.

Two years after writing the très informative Films of the New French Extremity, Alexandra West looks closer to home with The 1990s Teen Horror Cycle: Final Girls and a New Hollywood Formula. Kicked off by the word-of-mouth phenomenon that was Wes Craven’s Scream, the dead-teenager subgenre that briefly flourished thereafter is a fascinating movement in modern pop culture, and certainly one worth studying. This McFarland release isn’t going to be the definitive word on the trend, but for now, it’s as close as we have. If you were sober through much of the Nineties, you can skip the history refresher of the introduction and somewhat redundant first two chapters, and delve right into the chronological countdown of carnage, from comedic flirtations with the genre (My Boyfriend’s Back) to the all-out spoofs (Scary Movie) and inevitable reboots (Scream 4). West demonstrates a firm grasp of the material and presents it across pages that flow with ease, no matter how many uses of “codified.” I just wish her attention to names were as mighty; in discussing Teaching Mrs. Tingle (likely in more depth than anyone on the planet), she double-mangles Jeffrey Tambor as “Jeffery Tambour,” while 40th POTUS Ronald Reagan is rendered throughout the book as “Regan,” no fewer than thrice. —Rod Lott

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