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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While Gary Pullin might not be a (haunted) household name just yet, horror fiends will instantly recognize his work from his numerous terrifying Rue Morgue magazine covers, with perhaps the most esoteric of fearful fandoms also familiar with many of his wish-fulfillment movie poster prints that have graced everything from theatrical reissues to home video slipcovers.

Whether you know him or don’t, there’s Ghoulish: The Art of Gary Pullin for all of you burgeoning beasties and experienced exorcists out there; from 1984 Publishing, it’s a deadly deluxe book that, with every paper-cutting page turn, features the most maleficent of Pullin’s blood work, from early drawings of Freddy Krueger and Dr. Phibes to more recent posters for evil events such as Texas Frightmare Weekend and the Days of Dead convention.

The text, written by April Snellings, fills us in on much of Pullin’s life, from his early monster-kid inkling to his current projects as a famous monster of filmland. It’s a great read and Pullin seems like the kind of guy you can eat a raw steak with. Or maybe a grilled steak. Whichever comes first, I guess.

With a smart stab of pop culture relevance in every single clean and clear drawing of death that Pullin does, it’s hard not to sit here, reading the devilish tome and not be wishing there were posters of just about every bloody piece of his available to cover every inch of wall space in your bedroom, den or torture chamber. It might be Ghoulish in title, but it’s great reading in practice. —Louis Fowler

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I loved comic books as a child, but because I was rather sheltered, many of them were off-limits, especially the forbidden fruit bearing the phrase “A Warren Magazine.” For years, those issues incessantly teased me from the rack at Pratt’s Grocery. Still, I devoured Bill Schelly’s James Warren, Empire of Monsters: The Man Behind Creepy, Vampirella, and Famous Monsters as if I were part of the club all along. A breeze of a read, the biography of Warren paints him as something as the Roger Corman of comics: a cheapskate, but something of a talent farmer. The latter gives Schelly a wealth of sources to tap since Warren — something of a recluse — did not directly participate. What’s surprising is how little a role Forrest J. Ackerman, the public face of Warren’s Famous Monsters cash cow, plays in the overall picture; that’s to the book’s benefit, as Warren is quite the personality on his own, sexual quirks and all. Meriting cameos in his rags-to-riches-and-back-again tale are Gloria Steinem, Stephen King, Hugh Hefner, Jane Fonda, Al Adamson, John Cleese and Fred Flintstone — only one of those a bedroom conquest. Coming from Fantagraphics, the hardcover is quite the beauty in the design department (kudos, Keeli McCarthy) and boasts an eight-page color insert of those gorgeously painted Warren covers that will have you crying for a full book of them.

Howard Maxford’s Hammer Complete: The Films, the Personnel, the Company is every bit the monster as the vampire adorning its cover; at almost 1,000 pages and 6 pounds, the McFarland & Company hardback demands such a description. Of course, per the title, the book is about more than Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy and other creatures that turned the once-moribund UK studio into a name brand forever associated with horror and fantasy cinema. Fifteen years in the making, Hammer Complete arrives with an admirable mission: Cover all things Hammer from A (Abady, Temple) to Z (Zuber, Marc). In essence, the book functions not as a cover-to-cover read, but as an encyclopedia, with luminaries like Ingrid Pitt and Peter Cushing meriting multiple pages. It’s thorough as hell, I’ll give it that — more thorough than thorough, even. Just when I was ready to ding it for not including movies announced but never produced (e.g., Vampirella), I arrive at an appendix of just that: pages and pages of them! For my money, I still find Tom Johnson and Deborah Del Vecchio’s Hammer Films: An Exhaustive Filmography (also from McFarland) to be the more useful resource, even if its 1996 publication means you won’t find the recent revival titles (such as The Woman in Black, Wake Wood and The Resident) that Maxford does.

If he were alive today, Robin Wood would’ve been tickled pink over the current horror resurgence, from arthouse to Blumhouse. As the new book Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews proves pound for pound, page by page, he was arguably the first film critic to take the genre seriously, whereas his peers equated it to pornography. Compiled by Barry Keith Grant (The Dread of Difference), the Wayne State University Press release contains everything Wood ever wrote on the subject, save for one paragraph, making it an automatic must-have for genre enthusiasts’ home libraries. Like any serious film critic, Wood could be accused of reading too much into things, but that’s the exception, not the norm; furthermore, his prose is simply pleasurable to read. Unlike any serious film critic, his attention to horror wasn’t limited to Alfred Hitchcock and George A. Romero; yes, those are here, of course, but so are Lewis Teague’s Cujo and Gary Sherman’s Raw Meat, which he champions so fervently, it’s infectious — David Cronenberg pun not intented. —Rod Lott

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Here I was, for all these years, thinking I was the only dumb kid who clipped movie ads out of the newspaper.

Whenever my dad was through with The Dallas Morning News or The Dallas Times Herald, whichever he picked up that day, I scoured through their massive entertainment sections, cutting out the advertisements for movies that I knew would never come to my small town of Blooming Grove, Texas, but maybe someday I’d catch them on TV or, even better, VHS.

I think my mother threw that collection of yellowing pulp out sometime ago, sadly, but here’s Ad Nauseam, which is definitely the next best thing. A collection of 10 years’ worth of newspaper advertisements — apparently printed straight from the dailies themselves — by former Fangoria honcho Michael Gingold, the memories this book will resurrect from the dead is a beautifully scary thing.

From the classics like first runs of Poltergeist and reissues of Halloween to — and the most interesting, in my opinion — trashy works like Death Valley and Madman, as well as the horror comedies of Once Bitten and Transylvania 6-5000 and, let’s not forget, the Italian imports such as The Gates of Hell and Demons, everything your adolescent mind could have dreamed up from such imaginative slicks — and, let’s be honest, were often better than the actual film — is right there, all in screaming black and white ink.

For the actual readers, however, there are even a few quotes from Oklahoma City film critics along the pages, most notably The Daily Oklahoman’s burly Gene Triplett, who calls Friday the 13th Part 3: 3D a “snuff movie” — which goes to show that there’s a reason people have called his paper “the Daily Disappointment” for 50 or so years.

But Ad Nauseam is far from any kind of disappointment. While yes, many people won’t get it — especially fathers who ask “Why do you waste your time with these stupid horror movies?” — for those of us who remember the grotesque excitement of the movies, the ads — hell, even the newspaper in general — this is a grue-soaked return to the glory days of gory cinema.

Or, as they’re known in Oklahoma, “snuff movies.” —Louis Fowler

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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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