A Horror History Well Beyond Movies Alone For more than 200 years, readers have jumped at the chance to be scared out of their wits, make their flesh creep, and their blood curdle. Award-winning author Robert Weinberg has brought the best of twentieth century horror together in this remarkable volume.

The most renowned writers, illustrators, publishers, actors, and filmmakers are drawn together in this exquisite portrayal of horror. Every media from comics, paperbacks, hardcovers, and movies is represented in full color.

As an award-winning writer of fifteen horror novels and many other short stories and anthologies, Weinberg is well-qualified to present this chapter of American pop culture. Drawn from his world-renowned collection of over 25,000 genre-related materials, this is a sure favorite for all age groups.

Hardcover w/embossed jacket 10" X 13", 256 pages 450 full-color images ISBN: 1-888054-42-5 $60 . Ordering info available at collectorspress.com.

Horror fiction, with its eternal struggle between good and evil, made good theater. Numerous Gothics were turned into plays. Thus, it's not surprising that within five years of its original publication, the greatest of all such novels, Frankenstein, was adapted for the stage.

However, nineteenth-century audiences were no different than today's in that they craved action and melodrama, not philosophy and talk. So, the numerous theatrical versions of Mary Shelley's novel  produced over the next hundred years abridged, revised, and rewrote the story until often times all that remained was the mad scientist and his monstrous creation.

Much the same happened to Dracula, though the first stage version was written by the vampire's creator, Bram Stoker, in 1901. Again, turning a long novel into a stage production meant eliminating numerous scenes and dropping sequences that could be described in a story but not shown on a stage.

Dracula was transformed from horror into melodrama, as the sinister Count became less monstrous and more seductive. From stage to screen was a natural step forward, as Thomas A. Edison produced the first version of Frankenstein on film in 1910. The lost film starred Charles Ogle and, like many of the theatrical versions, had a happy ending.

Most early American filmmakers stayed away from the horror genre, but such movies were a mainstay of the German cinema. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, directed in 1919 by Robert Wiene, used stylized Expressionist sets that gave the film a bizarre, unreal look. Conrad Veidt played the sleepwalking killer, Cesare, in what turned out to be a story within a story. One of the great classics of the silent screen, Caligari influenced many horror films to follow with its use of unique sets and unusual camera angles.

Equally bizarre was Nosferatu, a 1922 unauthorized adaption of Dracula with the villain renamed Graf von Orlok. Directed by Friedrich W. Murnau,the film starred an actor billed as Max Schreck ("terror" in German). The vampire portrayed with enlarged head, bulging eyes, talons, andfangs bore little resemblance to Bram Stoker's Count. Stoker's widow sued the production company and most copies of the movie were destroyed. Still,it was the first attempted adaptation of Dracula, and several of the sceneswere quite effectively filmed.

The first memorable horror film in America, The Phantom of the Opera, starred Lon Chaney. Noted for his willingness to contort his body any way possible to fit the role, Chaney handled all of his own make up (a taskt hat became impossible several years later as makeup artists in Hollywood unionized).

His depiction of Erik, the Phantom, required him to insert plugs into his nose to spread his nostrils, wear false teeth that drew back the edges of his lips, and place discs in his mouth to distort his cheeks. All the work proved worth the effort, as the scene in which Christine Daae unmasked the Phantom was one of the most memorable moments ever captured on film. Press reports of the era had women fainting in the aisles when Chaney's face turned.

The film's success, however, didn't inspire motion picture companies to start producing horror movies. Chaney played numerous characters requiring him to twist his body in numerous ways, but his only notable horror role was that of a detective who pretends to be a vampire in London After Midnightin 1927. There were only so many shocks and surprises possible in silent films.

All that changed with the advent of talking pictures. Voice became asimportant as good looks, and the careers of a number of actors and actressescame to an abrupt end. Scripts written without dialogue suddenly had to be redone and Hollywood looked to Broadway for popular shows that could be made into movies.

One such play was Dracula, which ran for nearly a year at New York's Fulton Theater. Afterwards, it toured much of the country. Playing the lead role of the Count was a Hungarian actor named Bela Lugosi.

Universal Pictures, which had acquired the film rights to Stoker's novel, chose Tod Browning as director. Browning wanted Lon Chaney to play left the role vacant. Lugosi, who had already appeared in several other films, was Browning's second choice. Dracula was produced in eight weeks and was released in New York City in February 1931. The film, while not well received by the critics, was a huge success and made Bela Lugosi, at forty-nine, a star.

The movie, based more on the play than the novel, was slow moving and very talkative. Lugosi, with his Hungarian accent, spoke slowly and precisely. Still, he made a menacing villain and immortalized a number of memorable lines, including, "Listen to them. Children of the night. What music they make."

With the success of Dracula, Universal decided to film Frankenstein. Lugosi was set to star as the monster but objected to the amount of makeup needed and his lack of dialogue. The part, instead, went to Boris Karloff, a forty-four-year-old actor spotted by director, James Whale, in the studio commissary. Karloff had been working in Hollywood for nearly ten years, often playing villains because of his gaunt features.

It took more than three hours each day to apply the makeup Karloff wore as the monster. Still, while his body was heavily padded and he was forced to wear boots each weighing eighteen pounds, his expressive features were hardly altered, allowing Karloff to fully display his acting talents.

Though he had no dialogue, his facial expressions evoked pity as much as horror. Karloff's monster was a confused, lost soul betrayed by his creator. In the film's credits, the role of the monster was credited with a ?. As with Lugosi and Dracula, it only took one movie, Frankenstein, to make Karloff a star.

Fame, however had its price. With their distinctive mannerisms and features, both Karloff and Lugosi soon found themselves type cast as monsters or villains in every role they were offered. Karloff, not an egoist, was happy for the work. For Lugosi it took many more setbacks until he finally came to accept that Dracula had made him famous and not the other way around.

The success of Dracula and Frankenstein established horror as a new film genre. Earlier movies such as a The Phantom oof the Opera and London After Midnight had been considered mysteries with weird elements.

But a vampire and a man-made monster were definitely not mysteries. Universal Pictures, which had produced both films, counted its profits and  embraced the horror genre with a cold, clammy handshake.

In Hollywood, success bred competition. Paramount Pictures entered the horror market with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, starring Fredric March. The story had been filmed before and would be filmed a number of times afterwards, but March's performance in the dual role was never duplicated. Giving an extra boost to the horror genre, March won an Oscar for his portrayal of man and monster.

Much less successful was MGM's first horror film, Freaks. Based on the short story "Spurs" by Tod Robbins, the film was directed by Tod Browning, fresh off his success with Dracula.

Browning was familiar with Robbin's fiction, having made successful silent and sound versions of the author's novel, The Unholy Three. Freaks, however, proved to be the horror picture Browning should have never made. The film used the background of a circus freak show to tell the story of a beautiful aerialist who marries a dwarf and then schemes to kill him for his money.

The horror of the film wasn't the plot but the players. Browning populated his movie with real circus freaks, ranging from pinheads to Siamese twins to a "living torso."

Watching actors in horrifying makeup frightened audiences. Seeing real-life horrors repulsed them. Freaks was pulled by MGM after its initial release and the movie was banned in England for more than thirty years.

Several years later, MGM ventured once more into the horror field, again using a pulp story for the plot and Tod Browning as the director. Basedon A. Merrit's novel, Burn, Witch, Burn, The Devil Doll came out in 1936. It featured Lionel Barrymore as an escaped convict who knew the secret of shrinking people to the size of dolls.

These miniature people, under Barrymore's command, go into Paris and kill his enemies using sharpened needles. The movie, with fine specialeffects, was extremely popular.

Dr. X was Warner Brothers first entry into the horror genre. It starred Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray in a bizarre story of a mad surgeon killing his victims in order to create synthetic flesh. More interesting then the plot was that the film was filmed in two-color Technicolor.

Mystery of the Wax Museum followed, again featuring Atwill and Wray. Atwill starred as Professor Ivan Igor, the creator of a spectacular wax museum.

Glenda Farrell played the daring newspaper journalist who discovered Igor was stealing corpses from the morgue and coating them with wax to give his figures the appearance of life. Not until the climax of the feature was it revealed that Atwill's face was also a wax mask, hiding hideously disfigured features beneath.

Meanwhile, Universal was busily crafting new monsters for the horror market. The Mummy, released in 1932, featured Karloff as an ancient Egyptian high priest, Imhotep, buried alive, who is unwittingly brought back to life by a group of archeologists.

Despite the title, Karloff only appeared in bandages at the film's beginning. The same year saw Karloff in a small part in the horror spoof, The Old Dark House.

Universal's other horror star, Lugosi played the mad Dr. Mirakle in 1932's Murders in the Rue Morgue, a very loose adaptation of the Poe classic.

Always anxious to work, he then appeared in the independently produced White Zombie. Based on William Seabrook's famous non-fiction book on Haiti, The Magic Island, the film featured Lugosi as  Legendre, a Frenchman who uses zombies as slave labor on his plantation.

Lugosi also had a small role in Universal's Island of Lost Souls, starring Charles Laughton as the mad Dr. Moreau. Loosely based on the science-fiction novel by H.G. Wells, the film was banned in Britain for its scenes of overt sexuality, cruelty to animals, and gruesome horror.

As leader of the beast men, Lugosi again made an impact with his recitation of the movie's most chilling line, "Are we not men?"

Well's fiction returned to the screen again in 1933, with The Invisible Man. Claude Rains played the title character. The movie, which forwarded the mad-scientist theme in horror pictures, was scripted by R.C. Sheriff and Philip Wylie and was based more on Wylie's recently published novel, The Murderer Invisible, than on Wells' work.

Though its credits said 1934's The Black Cat was suggested by Poe's short story, there was nothing in the movie to connect it with the titleother than a cat. It did star Karloff and Lugosi, the first of several pairings of horror's most famous leading men.

The sets, done in the style of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari were impressive and Karloff and Lugosi both turned in impressive performances in a complex tale of good versus evil.

Peter Lorre starred in 1935's Mad Love playing one of the most insane surgeons ever seen on the screen. The twisted tale told how Lorre grafted the hands of a killer onto the arms of a famous pianist. Obsessively in love with the pianist's wife, Lorre then tried to convince the man that the hands have turned him into a murderer.

Boris Karloff returned to his most famous role in 1935's The Bride of Frankenstein. Directed again by James Whale, the film was the truest inconcept to Shelley's novel. It was not a happy reunion for Karloff and the heavy makeup: he broke his hip on the first day of filming. The film featured Elsa Lanchester as the monster's bride. In a brief foreword to the film, Lanchester played Mary Shelley discussing her novel with Lord Byron.

Werewolves debuted in 1935's The Werewolf of London, starring Henry Hull and Warner Oland. Hull played an explorer bitten by a werewolf in Tibet but not killed. Hull returns to London only to discover he turns into a half-man, half-wolf whenever the moon is full. Only a rare Tibetian flower can halt the process, and Hull engages ina deadly duel with Oland, also in London, for the flowers.

Universal teamed Lugosi and Karloff in another film "inspired" by Poe, this time titled The Raven. Lugosi played a mad plastic surgeon who, with Karloff's aid, tortured a group of weekend visitors to his mansion with devices right out of "The Pit and the Pendulum."

The next year, 1936, saw Karloff and Lugosi team yet again in The invisible Ray. Karloff played a scientist driven mad by radioactivity who became a walking death ray who could melt statues by merely staring at them. Lugosi was cast in the role of a loyal friend trying to save his insane comrade.

Horror films were losing their luster by 1936. English censors refuseda number of them to be shown in Britain, thus cutting down on a major market for overseas distribution. And, stories were beginning to become predictable and dull.

The last major horror film from Universal in the first horror boom was Dracula's Daughter, released in 1936. It starred Gloria Holden as the vampire's daughter, eager to escape the curse of vampirism but unable to deny her thirst for blood. An arrow through the heart appeared to be the death blow to horror features. But horror refused to stay dead.

A double-bill re-release of Dracula and Frankenstein in 1939 drew huge crowds. Studios like Universal had fallen on hard times and pulling people into theaters was a major concern. Old favorites, dressed up in new clothing, seemed a sure method of selling tickets. So, Universal jumped back into horror with titles such as Son of Frankenstein with Karloff, Lugosi, Atwell, and Basil Rathbone (1939) and The Invisible Man Returns (1940).

The same year saw the return of the mummy in The Mummy's Hand, but this time the mummy became a bandage-clad monster, not a resurrected sorcerer.

The best of this second  round of Universal horror films was The Wolfman, made in 1941, starring Lon Chaney, Jr. The plot told of Larry Talbot, a young man bitten by a werewolf but not killed.

To his  horror, the gentle, kind Talbot became a murderous wolfman whenever the moon was full. He was finally killed by  his own father, using a cane with a silver handle. Extremely melodramatic, the film spawned a number of sequels.

Since so few actual folk legends existed about werewolves, screenwriter Curt Siodmak invented most of the details concerning the monsters, from their aversion to silver to changing from man to wolf during the full moon.

These concepts, repeated in numerous sequels to the film, gradually became accepted as actual myth. Thus, in a strange twist of fate, modern folklore about werewolves came not from gypsy traditions but from a Hollywood screenwriter.

The same year saw Karloff working for Columbia Pictures in one of his finest roles. The Devil Commands was based on William Sloane's novel, The Edge of Running Water.

The film had nothing to do with the devil but instead had Karloff asa scientist obsessed with contacting his dead wife by scientific means. The film's climax, featuring an artificial seance created by electricity, was extremely effective.

Back at Universal, the company continued grinding out wilder and wilder sequels with smaller and smaller budgets. Titles included Ghost of Frankenstein (1942); The Mummy's Tomb (1942); Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman and Son of Dracula (1943). Its new entries into horror were little better with The Night Monster (1942) and The Mad Ghoul (1943).

Other studios, seeing horror as a cheap way to make movies, entered the marketplace during the war years. Most notable was RKO, where Val Lewton produced six horror pictures from 1942 through 1945. Lewtons best were Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943).

Both films were directed by Jacques Tourneur and relied on horror being implied instead of shown directly. In all of Lewtons films, the supernatural is suggested, and monsters are often product of the soul, not the body.

by 1944, horror films were in a steep decline. Universal's House of Frankenstein brought together Dracula, the Wolfman, and Frankenstein along with a mad  scientist and a hunchback. A year later the monstrous trio assembled at the House of Dracula.

The same year, 1945, saw Britain's first Horror find since the beginning of  World War II. British censors had refused to show horror movies, fearing they would hurt civilian morale. Dead of Night was an anthology of six short ghost stories that varied in effect and mood. Most remembered was the sequence featuring Michael Redgrave as a ventriloquist dominated by his evil puppet.

The second horror boom closed with a groan in 1948 with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. The silly but entertaining film featured Frankenstein's Monster, Dracula, and the Wolfman, and a female mad scientist. In a odd twist of fate Bela Lugosi, who played Dracula seventeen years earlier, reprised his role as the Count for the first time time since the original movie. The feature was the first of a series of Bud Abott and Lou Costello releases involving famous Universal Monsters including the Mummy and the Invisible Man. Beauty didn't kill the beast. Comedy did.  Ordering info available at collectorspress.com.