- Title: Great Horror Movies
- Author: Favius Friedman (the copyright page states "F. Louis Friedman"). According to Sim Branaghan's 2018 article "Monsters Maidens and Mayhem: Horror Film History Books 1965-79 (Part 2)" for Film on Paper, Friedman lived from 1900 to 1990. Branaghan notes: "Friedman arrived in Hollywood in 1944 and worked as a prolific Tinseltown journalist for the next 25 years or so. ... By the end of the 60’s Friedman had switched to writing a sequence of young-adult paperbacks for Scholastic Corp, who enjoyed (and continue to enjoy) a vast readership due to their historic monopoly on US grade-school Book Club distribution. Friedman wrote at least six Scholastic titles."
- Cover photo: That's Lon Chaney Jr. in Jack Pierce's chilling makeup for 1941's The Wolf Man.
- Back cover excerpt: "Do you stay up all night to watch horror flicks on the late late show? Are you first in line when reruns of old monster movies come to your neighborhood? If so, this book's for you. Fantastic and fabulous facts and figures about 70 of the world's most famous horror and monster movies."
- Publisher: Scholastic Book Services (TK 2408)
- Cover price: None listed.
- Year: First printing, February 1974
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 160
- Friedman's dedication: "This book is for Maxie, Karie and Im, Cordalie, and Anna Francesca."
- Friedman's acknowledgments: In a passage written in March 1973 and included in the book, Friedman gives credit to Carlos Clarens' An Illustrated History of the Horror Film; Peter Underwood's book Boris Karloff; Focus on the Horror Film, edited by Roy Huss and T.J. Ross; Focus on the Science Fiction Film, edited by William Johnson; Science Fiction in the Cinema by John Baxter; and friends Roger Corman, Julian Myers, and Mildred Simpson.
- Excerpt from the introduction: "Just how popular the movie King Kong has been over the years can be judged by what happened during a certain week in March 1955. Executives at a top television station in New York, WOR-TV, decided to try an experiment. They would program the 1933 film King Kong — then 22 years old — for seven evenings in a row, or a total of 16 consecutive showings (two a night and three over the weekend). The movie ran every night, all through that week of March 1955. Rival TV station managers are probably still in shock. That ancient horror flick, all but derided as "a silly trick epic" at its initial New York theatre showing, actually had more people watching it on television than sat through Ed Sullivan, Groucho Marx, and Bishop Fulton Sheen!"
- Small correction: Friedman has the other details right, but the year wrong. The 16 showings of King Kong were on WOR-TV from March 5-11, 1956.
- Films included in Great Horror Movies: There are about 70 of them summarized by Friedman! You can guess a lot of the obvious ones: The Birds, Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Haunting, The Innocents, King Kong, etc. There's a big emphasis on science fiction, with War of the Worlds, Planet of the Apes, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Forbidden Planet and Fahrenheit 451, among others. Both Val Lewton's Cat People and Curse of the Cat People (one of my Christmas favorites) are included. Among the most interesting, or outright bizarre, inclusions are Bigger Than Life (1956, with James Mason), Bobbikins (1959), Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), The Ghost Goes West (1935), The Boy with Green Hair (1948), The Mind Benders (1963), The Power (1968), and 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964).
- Rating on Goodreads: 4.0 stars (out of 5)
- Goodreads review excerpt: In 2021, Kirby Davis wrote: "I reread it now to study how my language appreciation has changed (it's interesting to find prose referring to Bette Davis and Vincent Price in the present tense), to count how many of these films I have actually watched over the last half-century, to reflect on how horror films have changed over that time, and to ponder how these films (and my appreciation for them) impacted my character. ... Even though Friedman's tome now covers but the first half of Hollywood's existence, the book provides insightful commentary on the state of the art up to that time and makes good recommendations on what to see."
- Rating on Amazon: 3.6 stars (out of 5)
- Amazon review excerpt: In 2016, Walter Solley wrote: "Friedman writes about this genre with obvious affection and his attitude is infectious. This book leaves you wanting to watch each of these great movies."
- More from Sim Branaghan: In the aforementioned Film on Paper article, Branaghan notes: "The treatment is tersely serious and the historical detail impressive — Friedman is very good at digging out the telling backstage anecdote or box-office snippet. Each film gets a one/two page analysis with cast and credits appended, occasionally followed by a brief overview of themed follow-ups. The oldest film discussed is Caligari (including some shrewd detail on its New York premiere) and the most recent Planet of the Apes. Hammer doesn’t appear (apart from The Nanny), but this is a far from conservative selection with some notably unusual choices."
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