3rd August 2009.

Hello & welcome back to the movie junk blog. It’s been a while but there is more junk on the way soon? Heres a question?

What does Harry Knowles of aint it cool news,re-animator comic, army of darkness comic, and a book written by Wes Craven and the pictorial history of horror films all have in common?

Well these were all books and comics found in a junk shop that I recently rediscovered and it’s with this find that I would like to explore the world of the horror book.

For me growing up in the 70s & 80s finding a book or books on horror films was like being given an overdose of gruesome images downloaded to my brain and memory before video overloaded those senses.

The horror book and film tie in novel provided a world of information of titles & gruesome fascination that had very little censorship within the pages of film stills and excerpts taken from the films themselves.

It was these books and the Saturday night BBC2 double bills that fed my hunger for horror.

Long before I saw Cronenberg’s shivers on video, I saw the stills of the parasite beneath a mans stomach and I would remember all of these titles for around the corner was an entertainment revolution, bringing into the home the films I could only read about, the home video revolution was about to hit

These books bridged a gap between what I could and had already seen and those films I needed to find and watch, where the film tie in novel worked for me was providing me with the ability to read a film that I had yet to see or couldn’t find on video before DVD arrived, who would have thought that Squirm or the bad trip movie Blue Sunshine had a tie in novel.

Books on horror films were available in libraries in shops and there was no censorship in some of the content, staked female vampires with naked breasts, zombies with a machete though their skull had a huge effect, parents could stop you from watching or renting a video, but horror books passed under the parental radar.

Reading about these films was second only to the pictures, if only I had known about Michael Weldon’s, psychotronic magazine, back then, my only hope of reading about horror was the monthly Starburst magazine, even though I did pick up fangoria in around 86 led to me increasing the films I needed to find.

I would avidly scour second hand bookshops In the 90s as well as video stores collecting videos, even if the versions available made no sense thanks to censorship and Elephant videos shameful output and I have to admit that I did copy films for my own collection, knowing that an obscure movie that I saw one day, wouldn’t be there the next.

That was how I came across Turkey Shoot on the guild label one day in a new video shop called Ritz; little did we know it would be the cuckoo of high streets pushing out all the competition and ending independent video shops in most towns and cities.

New stores were being stocked with many titles some were still pre cert copies and it was watch them as fast as I could as they were soon to disappear.

The path to discovering films was sometimes a long one and still can be, but the reward is finding that title no matter how obscure it is.

But there is a lot of fun in finding something new to find and even if EBay may have made collecting that much easier, if you find a junk shop that looks interesting stop and have a look you may find more than you expected.

Untill next time

Nicola.