The wait is over! Satan in the Celluloid: 100 Satanic and Occult Horror Movies of the 1970s is now available in print and e-format!
You can grab the ebook from Godless
Or Amazon, where the print version is also available.
So, if you’re into occult horror, exorcists, and movies about sinister cults, be they the big budget classics or the grimy grindhouse, drive-in ‘b’ movies and video nasties, be sure to pick up your copy and, as always, please consider leaving a review. Fresh books need them!
My most recent book is a follow up to one of my bestsellers – Barbarians at the Gates of Hollywood: Sword and Sorcery Movies of the 1980s – and my second non-fiction book. I’m thrilled to bring you Satan in the Celluloid: 100 Satanic and Occult Horror Movies of the 1970s, which has been a real passion project for me for the best part of a year.
You know the movies I mean. The Exorcist, The Omen etc. But there were a ton of other movies (most on the cheaper end of the spectrum) some of which are downright bizarre. Satan in the Celluloid is available to pre-order from Amazon and will be released on January 28. You can also pick up the ebook from Godless.
The fourth entry in the Celluloid Terrors series – Road of Souls – is now available from Amazon! You can get it in print, for Kindle or, if you’re a member of Kindle Unlimited, you can read it for free! Get your copy here.
New entry in the Celluloid Terrors series is now available for pre-order!
Set in 1977, Road of Souls is inspired by occult thrillers and road movies from the 1970s. Head on over to Amazon to order your copy now!
America’s postwar prosperity had a marked effect on its young adults. A booming economy and the rise of high schools meant that many kids were no longer expected to leap straight into the workforce at a young age. For the first time ever, teenagers had money to spend and the time to spend it. Pop culture rushed to supply the demand. Rock ‘n’ roll happened; a musical revolution that was geared almost exclusively to teenagers and theaters and drive-ins began to show movies that catered to a younger demographic.
A perceived rise in juvenile delinquency accompanied this teenage revolution as parents read aghast, of kids terrorizing the streets in their hot rods, joining gangs, taking drugs and generally running amok. There was an element of hysteria about it and, as movie makers keenly capitalized on sensational headlines, the juvenile delinquent (or ‘JD’) movie was born.
Much like the gangster flicks of the 1930s, this new breed of cinema came with a moral warning label. Their melodramatic trailers were keen to emphasize that these movies weren’t trying to glamorize the drug-taking, joyriding exploits of their teenage protagonists, but were merely trying to warn kids of the pitfalls of such devil-may-care antics. But a lot of that was just lip service to the censors. These movies were titillating and often exploitative in their design to thrill the very people they were about; teenagers.
The Wild One (1953)
With his jaunty white cap, sideburns and leather jacket, a young Marlon Brando became an outlaw icon astride his Triumph Thunderbird as he led his Black Rebel Motorcycle Club into a dusty California town for a rowdy weekend. The short story by Frank Rooney on which The Wild One is based was inspired by the fabled Hollister Riot; a small bit of bother at American Motorcyclist Association rally which was massively sensationalized by the press in 1947.
With Brando’s Johnny Strabler and his outlaws tearing up the town and their dust up with a rival gang (led by a young Lee Marvin), The Wild One felt like a western updated for a new generation and only added to the hysteria surrounding teenagers and biker gangs. The movie was even banned in the UK until 1967.
Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
Teen angst never looked so cool as the sensitive misfit Jim Stark (James Dean) with his white tee, red jacket and messy hair. Picked on by high school meathead ‘Buzz’, Jim is roped into a contest of machismo in that staple of the ’50s teen movie; the ‘chickie run’. The fallout leads to Jim hiding out in an abandoned mansion with the equally lost and troubled Judy (Natalie Wood) and the abandoned (and clearly homosexual) Plato (Sal Mineo). It’s a brief respite from a world that doesn’t have a place for them as the movie’s devastatingly bleak climax approaches.
Rebel Without a Cause is one of those movies given inadvertent weight by real-life tragedy. The death of James Dean in a car crash a month before the movie’s release meant that Dean, like his most famous character, remains frozen in time as the epitome of the teenage outsider and a cultural icon.
Blackboard Jungle (1955)
The tale of a new teacher’s struggle to connect with the pupils of a rough, intercity school is a plot we’ve seen many times since but Glenn Ford’s clashes with rapists and switchblade-wielding gang members in Blackboard Jungle was highly controversial on its release. Standout performances by Sidney Poitier and Vic Morrow as the troubled teens Ford refuses to give up on lift this from melodrama to something much more powerful.
The movie is also notable for being one of the first to feature a rock song on its soundtrack, namely ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and his Comets which reportedly had teenagers dancing in the theater aisles and, in some instances, ripping up the seats. The song’s popularity soared and inspired a movie of the same name the following year, giving birth to the ‘rock and roll movie’.
Running Wild (1955)
Undercover cop Ralph Barton (William Campbell) infiltrates a teenage car theft ring led by gangster Osanger (Kennan Wynn). Loyalties are torn as Ralph falls for Osanger’s moll, Leta (Kathleen Case) who is desperate to protect her illegal immigrant father from deportation.
Although sounding like The Fast and the Furious of the fifties, Running Wild actually doesn’t feature any car chases and is more of a crime drama. It is however notable for being the first such movie to feature blonde bombshell Mamie Van Doren who would go on to play the bad girl in many a JD movie. There is also a young John Saxon in his first movie appearance.
I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957)
Echoes of Jekyll and Hyde abound in this cult classic as short-tempered high school student Tony (Michael Landon) is roped into a psychological experiment by Dr. Brandon (Whit Bissell). Despairing of the state of humanity, Brandon is convinced that its only hope is to use past life regression to hurl man “back to his primitive state”. Tony is inadvertently turned into a slavering werewolf and runs rampant across campus.
Werewolf movies, although popular in the 1940s, fell out of favor at the dawn of the Cold War when teenagers flocked to see movies about alien invaders and giant radioactive bugs. I Was a Teenage Werewolf married old-fashioned horror with new-fangled science fiction and offered a clever commentary on those frenzied, hairy creatures driven by primal, sexual lust. Oh, and werewolves.
Reform School Girl (1957)
Donna Price (Gloria Castillo) takes the rap when the stolen car her boyfriend is driving hits and kills a pedestrian. Refusing to rat on Vince (Edward Byrnes), Donna is sent to reform school where a sympathetic psychologist (Ross Ford) takes a shine to her. Meanwhile, the police are closing in on Vince who is terrified Donna will blab. Seeking to silence her for good, he frames Donna as a stool pigeon and hopes that her fellow inmates will do his dirty work for him.
Hot Rod Rumble (1957)
The members of the Road Devils hot rod club are fed up with their overly aggressive member Arnie Crawford (Richard Hartunian). Even his girl, Terri (Leigh Snowden) ditches him and takes off with another boy called Hank. So when a car sideswipes Terri and Hank on their way home, killing Hank and knocking Terri unconscious, all fingers point at Arnie. He’s innocent but has a tough time proving it to his friends, his family and the cops.
High School Hellcats (1958)
New girl Joyce Martin (Yvonne Lime Fedderson) struggles to fit in at high school until she is asked to join a girl gang called the Hellcats led by Connie Ross (Jana Lund). The rules are simple; don’t get good grades and only date Hellcat approved boys. Joyce breaks the latter and strikes up a secret relationship with square-jawed coffee shop boy Mike (Brett Halsley). When a game of sardines at an illicit house party ends up with Connie tumbling down the stairs to break her neck, the girls flee the scene and swear themselves to silence. But when the police start sniffing around, tensions in the gang begin to stretch to breaking point.
High School Confidential (1958)
New kid in school Tony Baker (Russ Tamblyn) is in fact an undercover cop who is there to bust a narcotics ring, 21 Jump Street style. He befriends Joan Staples (Diane Jergens) who has picked up a reefer habit and her friend Doris (Jody Fair) who has quite naturally (according to the authorities of the day) graduated to heroin. Tony eventually infiltrates the school dope-selling gang in his attempt to find the source of the junk. It’s the cast that really makes this movie pop, including John Drew Barrymore as the school’s top dog, Teenage Werewolf‘s Michael Landon, Mamie Van Doren posing as Tony’s seductive live-in aunt and Jerry Lee Lewis himself performing the title song.
Joy Ride (1958)
Middle-aged suburbanite Miles Renny (Regis Toomey) becomes the subject of a campaign of terror when four teenage boys set their hearts on taking his brand new Thunderbird out for a joy ride. The police are unable to help and the four thugs eventually graduate from threatening calls and bricks through the windows to a full on home invasion that puts Miles’s wife in the hospital. Driven to desperate measures, Miles decides to take the law into his own hands.
P. J. Thorndyke’s new novel – Invasion of the Brain Tentacle – is an homage to JD movies and alien invasion B movies of the 1950s. It tells the story of a meteorite that lands near a pleasant Californian town. Soon the townsfolk start showing strange symptoms and it falls to the local hot rodders and teenage gangs to deal with the fallout…
Check it out here!
By: Joseph Payne Brennan
Appeared in: Weird Tales (March, 1953)
A volcanic upheaval on the bottom of the ocean floor releases a primeval, gelatinous glob that rises up and slithers through the outskirts of a New England town. As people (and cows) begin to vanish, a police search is set in motion and the true nature of the slithering horror is gradually revealed.
Slime follows a very simple and episodic plot but Brennan’s writing and the sense of terror he creates of what might be lurking out in the darkness is superb. Drawing on the Lovecraftian tradition of unstoppable, primeval horrors, Slime’s influence on both horror fiction and Hollywood is clear. The 1958 sci-fi classic The Blob isn’t an adaptation of Brennan’s story but it comes damn close.
Although Brennan would go on to become one of the greatest writers of short horror fiction of the ’60s and ’70s, by 1953 the age of the pulp magazine was coming to an end. Weird Tales folded the year after Slime‘s publication and, in response, Brennan founded his own magazine – Macabre – as a rallying point for all Weird Tales alumni who needed a new outlet for their stories. Always an H. P. Lovecraft enthusiast, Brennan printed several articles devoted to the master of cosmic horror and Macabre became an important step in the continuation of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos.
In 1937, long before Dungeons & Dragons, two friends began designing a board game set in the fantasy world of Nehwon (‘no when’ spelled backwards). They each wrote a story concerning two of this world’s adventurers; a giant northern barbarian called Fafhrd and his diminutive comrade, the Gray Mouser. The two friends were Fritz Leiber and Harry Otto Fischer and their characters of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were loosely based upon themselves, Leiber being tall and Nordic-looking while Fischer was somewhat smaller and darker.
It would be Leiber who would continue with the literary side of their adventures. The first short story featuring the duo to be published was Two Sought Adventure (later to be re-titled The Jewels in the Forest), in the August 1939 issue of Unknown. Leiber would pen over 30 stories concerning Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. In the beginning, they were only loosely connected without much in the way of continuity but, by the 1970s, Leiber had begun to put them in chronological order, ripe for publication as a set of volumes.
The first book in the collected saga was Swords and Deviltry, published by Ace Books in 1970. It’s comprised of four sections; a story each for Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser before their definitive first meeting in the highly acclaimed tale Ill Met in Lankhmar. This is all preceded by Part I which is a brief taster called ‘Induction’ and is an alternate and context-light description of the first meeting of our heroes in the massive-walled and mazy-alleyed metropolis of Lankhmar.
Part II is the tale of The Snow Women in which Fafhrd’s youth in the snowy wastes of the north is recalled and the events that led to his departure for warmer environments. Originally published in the April 1970 issue of Fantastic Stories it tells of an eighteen-year-old Fafnir, a member of a matriarchal tribe of which his mother is a formidable elder. Despite the rage of his mother, Fafnir falls in love with Vlana, an actress in a travelling show and together the pair flee south.
Part III is the Gray Mouser’s turn in The Unholy Grail. First published in the October 1962 issue of Fantastic, we meet ‘Mouse’, a young apprentice of the exiled wizard Glavas Rho. After his master is slain, Mouse falls in love with Ivrian, the daughter of the duke who has outlawed magic in his realm. Captured by the duke and tortured, Mouse is presented with a choice; use black magic to escape with his life, or remain true to white magic and die.
Part IV is the Nebula and Hugo Award winning tale Ill Met in Lankhmar, which was first published in the 1970 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The mazelike warren of the city of Lankhmar is the setting where two members of the Guild of Thieves are ambushed simultaneously by Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Recognizing a kindred spirit in the other, the pair head back to the Mouser’s lodgings where Ivrian waits. On the way, they pick up Fafhrd’s girl, Vlana, and the four of them have a private party. After imbibing much, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser concoct a bold plan to rob the Thieves’ Guild.
Beginning his career in the wake of Robert E. Howard’s suicide, Fritz Leiber picked up the torch of sword and sorcery from its fallen titan and carried it forward, helping shape and define the genre. We even owe the label ‘sword and sorcery’ to Leiber who unknowingly christened it in a 1961 letter in the Conan fan magazine Amra, as a reply to a question posed by fellow fantasy writer Michael Moorcock:
“I feel more certain than ever that this field should be called the sword-and-sorcery story. This accurately describes the points of culture-level and supernatural element and also immediately distinguishes it from the cloak-and-sword (historical adventure) story—and (quite incidentally) from the cloak-and-dagger (international espionage) story too!”
Leiber and Moorcock would go on to become members of SAGA (The Swordsmen and Sorcerers’ Guild of America), an informal gathering of like-minded writers who met for drinks after conventions and gave themselves outrageously pompous titles (Moorcock was The Veiled Thaumaturge of the Mauve Barbarians of Ningg). It was the efforts of SAGA and its anthologies like Flashing Swords! that promoted the genre in an era when it had largely been forgotten and are responsible for sword and sorcery being recognized as it is today. Leiber’s influence is highly notable in both sword and sorcery and high fantasy (his walled city of Lankhmar and its various guilds is clearly recognizable in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series).
By: C. L. Moore
Appeared in: Weird Tales (October, 1934)
Character/series: Jirel of Joiry
In what seems to be an alternate medieval France, Jirel, ruler of Joiry, is dragged before her conqueror, Guillaume, who has just taken her castle and is lolling on its dais, surrounded by the corpses of its defenders. Red-haired and yellow-eyed, Jirel is a fearsome warrior woman who radiates defiance. Guillaume forces himself upon her and she responds by attempting to tear out his throat. He knocks her out and has her imprisoned in her own dungeon.
That’s not going to hold our heroine of course, so, after braining her guard with a stool, Jirel sets off on her mission of revenge. With the help of her confessor, Father Gervase, she goes down “into hell tonight to pray the devil for a weapon, and it may be I shall not return.” There is a stairway, you see, beneath the castle that leads to a nightmarish alternate dimension. Jirel and Father Gervase discovered this previously but we are given little detail of this first visit or any idea as to who built it and why. As Jirel descends into a world where time and space do not follow the regular laws, she encounters Lovecraftian beings and her own doppelganger before finally encountering the titular deity and its terrible curse.
Without giving too much away, the weapon Jirel seeks is no ordinary weapon and there is a price to be paid for its use resulting in an ending that some readers have found distasteful. Personally, I found it an interesting (if tragic) idea that ditches the predictability of a happy ending for something deeper making Black God’s Kiss a cut above the average hack-and-slash adventure story. Jirel isn’t just Conan with a sex change. Her battles tend to be more emotional rather than physical. The obstacles she overcomes are psychological in nature rather than actual monsters and her greatest strength lies not in her sword arm but in her ferocious willpower.
It was a while before the readers and contributors of Weird Tales pegged that ‘C. L. Moore’ stood for Catherine Lucille Moore. Women writing for the pulps were rare and most assumed Moore was a man. She had already made a name for herself with her tales of intergalactic smuggler and Han Solo prototype, Northwest Smith, and enjoyed regular praise from H. P. Lovecraft with whom she corresponded as part of his literary circle of ‘weird’ authors. Four more Jirel stories would appear in Weird Tales as well as a cross-over with Northwest Smith in the tale Quest of the Starstone. This was a collaboration with fellow Lovecraft Circle member Henry Kuttner. In 1940, Moore and Kuttner married and the couple would collaborate on many stories and novels until Kuttner’s death in 1958.
Jirel is one of the first examples of the ‘warrior woman’ character that has become a mainstay in sword and sorcery fiction. Conan creator, Robert E. Howard, had penned similar characters like Belit the pirate queen in Queen of the Black Coast as well as The Shadow of the Vulture‘s Red Sonya of Rogatino (who would lend her name to one of the genre’s most famous warrior women; Marvel Comics’ Red Sonja). Moore certainly picked up the sword and sorcery torch after Howard’s suicide in 1936, but even Howard had taken a few pointers from Moore. The two were in correspondence in 1935 and Howard sent her the typescript for his story Sword Woman; a tale of a strikingly similar character called Dark Agnes de Chastillon set in 16th century France. He had apparently written this after the publication of Black God’s Kiss and it is notable that, like Jirel of Joiry, Dark Agnes has flame-red hair. But then, so too did Red Sonya of Rogatino (who appeared several months before Black God’s Kiss), suggesting an interesting cycle of influence between the two authors.
The legacy of the warrior woman owes a great deal to C. L. Moore’s Jirel tales and it’s a shame she doesn’t receive more recognition for her influence on the genre. Howard would pen two more Dark Agnes tales but they were never published in his lifetime. His other warrior woman was Valeria in the Conan tale Red Nails who (unlike most of Howard’s material) actually made it into the movie Conan the Barbarian (1982) in which she was played by Sandahl Bergman. A Red Sonja movie followed in 1985 as well as various imitators like the Barbarian Queen movies starring Lana Clarkson whom producer Roger Corman called “the original Xena Warrior Princess”. Sure, Xena is more famous and Red Sonja was inspired by a tale written before Black God’s Kiss but there is no denying the effect Moore and Jirel had on the evolution of the sword woman. Not only that, Moore was by far one of the better writers to continue sword and sorcery and the spirit of Howard’s writing in the immediate aftermath of his tragic departure from the world.
Some time ago, I started work on a project of passion that quickly evolved into two separate but connected books. One is a non-fiction book about sword and sorcery movies of the 1980s and the other is a novel inspired by those very movies. You know the ones; Conan the Barbarian (1982) and The Beastmaster (1982) and all the low-budget cash-ins like the Roger Corman-produced Deathstalker (1983) and Barbarian Queen (1985). There was also a ton of Italian entries like Conquest (1983) and Ator the Fighting Eagle (1982). These movies have long fascinated me – even the really terrible ones – and I always wanted to write a book in that vein.
Barbarians at the Gates of Hollywood: Sword and Sorcery Movies of the 1980s is out now and takes a comprehensive look at over 40 movies of the decade. What started as a planned series of blog posts soon blossomed into a full-blown book. It’s been an immense pleasure to research and write and I’m very pleased with the end result.
Bladereaper and the Game Zone of Fate is available for pre-order and is partly a sword and sorcery novel about the titular warrior Bladereaper and his fight against an evil sorceress in the distant land of Skaldheim. Simultaneously, it tells the story of Billy, a troubled teen in the America of 1987; a kid who finds solace in fantasy movies, comic books and video games. And he’s becoming obsessed with one game in particular; a new side-scrolling adventure game called Bladereaper. In the vein of Stranger Things and Ready Player One, Bladereaper and the Game Zone of Fate is my love letter to barbarian movies, ’80s arcade games and heavy metal.
So if any of this sort of thing is your bag, head on over to Amazon and take a look!
Buy Barbarians at the Gates of Hollywood: Sword and Sorcery Movies of the 1980s here.
Pre-order Bladereaper and the Game Zone of Fate here.
By: Jack Schaefer
Appeared in: Argosy (July – September, 1946)
Narrated by a boy called Bob Starrett, Rider from Nowhere tells of the mysterious stranger known only as ‘Shane’ and the effect he has on the Starrett family during a tense period of friction between a group of homesteaders and the open range cattle baron Luke Fletcher.
Anyone who has seen the 2003 film Open Range will find, as I did, an interesting switch in points of view. Here, the free-spirited open range cowboys are represented by the tyrannical Luke Fletcher and the threat to the open range way of life is the peaceful Starrett family and their neighbors who are simply trying to eke out a living by farming. This reminds us that the various Homestead Acts of the late 19th century, as with all things, had more than one side to them.
Shane himself is the archetypal western hero; a man with no name (or rather, only a first name and a dubious one at that), an unspoken past and a strict set of morals that make him a medieval white knight transplanted into the old west. He cuts an inspiring figure to the young Bob Starrett who idolizes him.
It’s a straightforward story but it packs an emotional wallop and is written in a reserved style that defies its pulpy origins. Republished as ‘Shane‘ in 1949, Schaefer’s classic has topped many a ‘greatest western novels’ list in the last seventy years and is mostly remembered for its 1953 film adaptation starring Alan Ladd which itself is a classic of the Western movie genre.
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