Tuesday 30 June 2009

Necronomicon

Necronomicon is billed as The Journal of Horror and Erotic Cinema. I believe there have been book-length collections so far. Book One contains eighteen essays, covering such disparate movies as The Evil Dead, Daughters of Darkness, Witchfinder General, Last Tango in Paris, The Bride of Frankenstein and Hitchcock’s Psycho, and directors from Herschell Gordon Lewis to Dario Argento. There are two excellent essays on Jean Rollin, and a good survey of adaptations of the work of H. P. Lovecraft.

Some contributors are a bit heavy on the film theory jargon and the psychoanalytical interpretations, but on the whole it’s still a reasonably stimulating selection of articles. It’s not like there’s a surplus of books on this subject, so if you have an interest in these types of movies, especially the exploitation horror of the 60s and 70s, then it’s probably worth trying to find a copy.

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