1990s mystery: Remember Horrorvision Video of Milford, Pa.?

Here's a minor history mystery. I was browsing through the Winter 1994 issue of Scarlet Street magazine (No. 13) and came across a full page ad for Horrorvision Video, selling VHS copies of old movies that would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible, to find on the standard market 30-plus years ago.

It states "Horrorvision Video" at the top, but "Big City Video" at the bottom, as the business, whatever its official name, had a larger catalog that featured "comedies, cartoons, serials, musicals, television shows, detective films [and] dramas." The address was a Post Office box in Milford, Pennsylvania and the name associated with the business is Vince Alisauskas. 

The quality is described as "all from film, all of really great quality. No multi-copied or junk reproductions. Try us and see. Sold from one collector to another. No rights given or implied. Some prerecorded titles."

The price was hefty, but that was the market at the time. It was $20 per title or $50 for three. That equates to $44 for one and $110 for three today. No small investment. But one of the few ways back then, perhaps, to get titles such as 1921's The Haunted Castle by F.W. Murnau, 1926's The Magician with Paul Wegener, Fire Maidens from Outer Space, Vampyr, The Secret of the Blue Room and more.

I'm guessing Horrorvision has long since gone out of business, but I'm surprised I can't find any information about it or memories online. And some of the VHS tapes must still be floating about. (It doesn't help with searches that there's a 2001 movie called Horrorvision.) Please share anything you know in the comments.

Clarence Sinclair Bull Halloween photo

Clarence Sinclair Bull (1896-1979) was the head of the still photography department at MGM for many years and is estimated to have photographed more than 10,000 subjects. He also served as Greta Garbo's personal photographer.

This amazingly lit C.S. Bull (as he was most commonly credited) photo from 1928 features actresses Anita Page, left, Gwen Lee and spooky doll.

Anita Page (1910-2008) was a leading lady alongside everyone from Buster Keaton to Clark Gable during the height of her career. According to Wikipedia, she received multiple marriage proposals from Benito Mussolini. Among her most notable films are Our Dancing Daughters, The Broadway Melody and Sidewalks of New York (a talkie with Keaton).

Gwen Lee (1904-1961) appeared in more than 60 films alongside the likes of Clara Bow, Lon Chaney, Joan Crawford, Robert Montgomery and Groucho Marx. Her notable films include Laugh, Clown, Laugh and A Lady of Chance, both from 1928.

Bull's photo reminds of this 1938 Judy Garland photo that I featured in 2014.

Scholastic book: "Great Horror Movies"

• 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."

Speaking of horror movies, check out these related Papergreat posts:

• Spooky cinema: My 53 personal favorites (2024)
• Dark & stormy night Halloween flick picks from Twitter's cool kids (2016)
• Great links: Which movies gave you the biggest fright? (2013) 

Typos and a big spoiler on VHS cover of "Night of the Living Dead"

I behaved over the past year and I've only added one VHS title to my tiny collection that includes Shock and King of the Zombies.

Mostly, I added it because it's hilarious in its audacity.

It's Congress Video Group's 1986 public-domain VHS release of George Romero's 1968 zombie classic Night of the Living Dead. 

Spoilers ahead!

The image on the front cover shows one of the very final moments of the film: Ben (Duane Jones), the main character, is being tossed into a bonfire after being mistaken for a ghoul and shot by a law enforcement posse. It's a grim and powerful moment in a visceral horror movie that eschews a cathartic ending.

Congress Video Group doubles down on the spoiler with this text on the back cover of the VHS box:

"Possibly the greatest low-budget film of all time filled with non-stop action. From the opening sequence, in which Judith O'Dea is terrorized by the first living corpse in the twilight cemetery, to the last slow dissolves and pans of still pictures, depicting the hero's death, the film is filled with ghoulish undertow that pauses only now and then on the thread-line to reality."

Maybe I'm overreacting. But I feel like, especially in 1986, there would have been plenty of potential viewers who didn't know how the film ended. 

Circling back to that (now spoiled) ending for a moment, actor Jones deserves some of the credit for how stark it was.

"I convinced George that the Black community would rather see me dead than saved, after all that had gone on, in a corny and symbolically confusing way," Jones said. "The heroes never die in American movies. The jolt of that, and the double jolt of the hero being Black seemed like a double-barreled whammy." [via SlashFilm, originally from The Wrap]

Jones, meanwhile, is disrespected by this VHS sleeve, which spells his name incorrectly as "Duanne Jones."

Judith O'Dea's name is spelled correctly. But there's another typo when Russell Streiner (Johnny, aka "They're coming to get you, Barbara" guy) is spelled as "Russel Streiner" in multiple places.

Romero receives no credit anywhere in the packaging.

According to the PD Video Wiki, Congress Video Group was founded as Memory Lane Video in 1984. The name change to Congress Video Group occurred in 1985. The company's assets were sold to Allied Film & Video Services in 1988 and Congress ceased operations in 1991. The wiki states that "Congress' tapes were of high quality," though that quality control apparently didn't extend to proofreading the packaging.

The company in its various iterations had a wide range of releases, including The Day of the Triffids, collections of mid-century cartoons, at least one Laurel & Hardy film, Three Stooges cartoons, Forbidden Planet, Little Shop of Horrors, Dementia 13, and something it called Mantis vs. Falcon Claws on the packaging. You can read about its logos at the Audiovisual Identity Database.

Here's Nebula wondering about the VHS.

"The Truth About Fake Giants and Other Great Hoaxes" (1981)

When I was traveling to visit my dad in West Virginia last month, I stayed in a hotel in Raleigh, Virginia, on the first night, and after a show about the architecture of the Pantheon ended, the only good thing on TV was Martin Scorsese's 2004 Howard Hughes biopic, The Aviator. Though it was late, I ended up watching the whole thing.

The next afternoon, Dad and I went to an awesome bookstore in Beckley, West Virginia, called Burm Booksellers (209 Prince Street). I highly recommend it, if you're ever in the area. They sell books on AbeBooks, too. While there, I was browsing the many shelves full of great old books and I came across this oddball that I'd never heard of: 1981's The Truth About Fake Giants and Other Great Hoaxes, published by Rourke Enterprises of Florida. And, lo and behold, one of the chapters in this book for kids was about Clifford Irving's hoax involving the attempted publication of a Howard Hughes biography. Why you'd have that as a chapter in a kids' book with robots, the Cardiff Giant and winged moon creatures featured on the covers, I have no idea. But it was a heck of Hughes coincidence.

Anyway, the book is amazeballs. It's a hardcover former library book measuring 5⅝ inches by 8⅞ inches. The colorful front and back covers and the interior black-and-white illustrations are by Norman Nodel (1922-2000), a World War II field artist for the U.S. Army who later became known for his illustrations for the Classics Illustrated series.

The author is Timothy Bay, who seems to have a much smaller biographical footprint online than Nodel. If anyone knows anything about him, please share it in the comments.

It's worth noting that this book was first published as Fake Giants and Other Great Hoaxes by EMC in 1980, before being republished in 1981 by Rourke Enterprises with the longer title that adds The Truth About... I have no idea why.

This book spent many years in the Gauley Bridge Library in West Virginia, which was part of the Fayette County Library System before closing in early 2014. The town has a population of less than 600, which may have been part of the reason for that. I do want to note, however, that the Fayette County Library System has an official cat, named Bob. And Bob is no hoax.

The book's table of contents page is pictured below, and I can tell you that, in addition to the Irving-Hughes hoax and the Cardiff Giant, the topics include "King of the Mediums" Daniel Douglas Home [sic], Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast, art forger Hans Van Meegeren [sic], the Piltdown Man, the New York Sun's fantastical moon hoax, and H.L. Mencken's bathtub hoax. It's an odd but fascinating mix.

The book possibly had a fairly limited distribution, because there's very little about it online, especially compared to similar books from the 1970s and early 1980s that focused on similar weird topics, such as the Contemporary Perspectives books. There are no reviews at all on Amazon or Goodreads. I guess this will have to become the post that champions and remembers the book, moving forward. Now is a good time to get a copy, if you're intrigued; I see at least two on eBay with prices under $20.

After the coincidence of The Aviator and The Truth About Fake Giants and Other Great Hoaxes, I was inspired to create a watch list of films that are intertwined in some interesting ways:

• Hell's Angels (1930, director: Howard Hughes)
• Ice Station Zebra (1968, John Sturges)
• F for Fake (1973, Orson Welles)
• The Night That Panicked America (1975 TV movie, Joseph Sargent)
• The Amazing Howard Hughes (1977, TV miniseries starring Tommy Lee Jones as Howard Hughes)
• Melvin and Howard (1980, Jonathan Demme)
• It's All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles (1993 documentary by Richard Wilson, Bill Krohn and Myron Meisel)
• The Aviator (2004, Martin Scorsese)
• The Hoax (2006, Lasse Hallström)

It also strikes me that you can draw a direct and fascinating line from Welles' F for Fake to this year's Nathan Fielder/Lance Oppenheim/Elizabeth Holmes film You Can See Everything.

And finally there's Clifford Irving's 1969 book Fake! The Story of Elmyr de Hory, the Greatest Art Forger of Our Time.

Dandy cover of Issue #9 of "Horror Monsters"

Here's the wonderfully horrifying cover of the Fall 1964 Issue #9 of Horror Monsters. This was the next-to-last issue of the magazine's existence. You can learn more about its short history in this 2024 post in which I showcased Issue #10.

The cover of this 35-cent issue features the Neanderthal Man from 1961's Valley of the Dragons (that may be Jack Elam under the makeup) and mentions the Vincent Price/Carol Ohmart classic The House on Haunted Hill, Lon Chaney Jr. in The Devil's Messenger, George Zucco, Mothra and 1956's The Black Sleep.

Below is the contents page, which notes that the members of the editorial staff were Sanzar Quasatoad, Quaszar Sanatoad, Santoad Zarquasar, Zarsatoad Sanqua and Toadzan Quasocar.

A hilarious cover design for Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein"

I stumbled across this on eBay last night and had a good laugh. It's described as the 1990 Ediciones Quinto Sol Spanish-language paperback edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. We have Boris Karloff as The Monster, making a very dumb face. Below his head are cartoon versions of his stitched-together hands, with a bundle of yellow flowers in each hand. Why you'd reference that scene from the 1931 movie, I have no idea. I'd love to know the story behind this cover design.

It brings this to mind, of course:

TV horror host: Ottola Nesmith

This photo of Ottola Nesmith being creepy appears in the May 26, 1958, issue of Life magazine, which features on its cover the attack on Vice President Richard Nixon's limousine in Caracas, Venezuela, on May 13, 1958. ("Week of World Tumult," states one of the headlines.)

Nesmith was featured as part of a Life photo essay on television's "Night Harbingers of Horror" — "The horror movie, now a staple of local late-night television shows, has spawned a new breed of announcers who take farfetched ways of introducing their spooky fare. ... These macabre masters of ceremonies try to get the viewers teetering on the edge of terror before The Frozen Ghost or Calling Dr. Death from a 52-film series called Shock."

Nesmith was the only woman horror host featured in the photo essay¹, which also included KRON's John Barclay (whom I believe was actually second fiddle to Russ Coglin on Nightmare Theater), KTNT's Warren Reed, WCAU's John Zacherle, and KFJZ's Bill "Gorgon" Camfield.

The caption for Nesmith under "A Little Old Lady Ghoul" states: "One of the few lady ghouls on TV is Ottola Nesmith of KTLA in Hollywood. She plays the role of a little old demented lady who sits in front of Victrola in rooming house, has weird visions. On show, directed by her son, she fancies herself the young beauty who gets abused in the horror films her program shows."

Nesmith appeared in more than 100 films, typically in smaller and uncredited roles. Some of her most notable films were The Wolf Man (1941), Mrs. Miniver (1942), Sunset Boulevard (1950) and the Val Lewton films The Leopard Man and The Seventh Victim.

If I may recommend a great book, film historian Gregory William Mank's The Very Witching Time of Night (2014) features a chapter on a pair of Shock! horror hosts, one of whom is Nesmith.² It's filled with wonderful details about her short time at KTLA and why her act as the "Lady Ghoul" got her sued by Frankenstein star Mae Clarke. It's quite the story.

Related posts

• Zacherley's 1960 Transylvania passport for fan club members
• Late nights and weekend afternoons of horror in the 1970s
• Ghoulardi's kid

Footnotes

1. The very first TV horror was a woman: Maila Nurmi, aka Vampira, hosted The Vampira Show in 1954 and 1955 on KABC in Los Angeles. But her show was off the air by the time of this Life photo essay. The 2021 book Glamour Ghoul: The Passions and Pain of the Real Vampira, Maila Nurmi, by Sandra Niemi, documents Nurmi's life.

2. Naturally, Mank is from Delta, Pennsylvania. Because everything revolves around York County, as we've long said.

Two-thirds of the way through the movie viewing year

We're two-thirds of the way through 2026, and I thought I'd share my work-in-progress ranking of favorite first watches of the year. It will be interesting to see how this list changes between now and the end of the year, in terms of both new additions and thinking more deeply about the films already on the list.

1. Harold and Maude (1971, director: Hal Ashby)

2. The Earrings of Madame de... (1953, Max Ophüls)

3. Brazil (1985, Terry Gilliam)

4. The Great Dictator (1940, Charlie Chaplin)

5. UFOria (1985, John Binder)

6. Sinners (2025, Ryan Coogler)

7. Times Square (1980, Allan Moyle)

8. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994, Stephan Elliott)

9. Backrooms (2026, Kane Parsons)

10. Sherlock Jr. (1924, Buster Keaton)

And here's the big catch. My favorite segment of the year, by far, is Federico Fellini's "Toby Dammit," (starring Terence Stamp, pictured above) from the 1968 anthology film Spirits of the Dead. However, the other two segments are not compelling enough to pull the film as a whole into the Top 10. (Sorry, Fonda siblings.)

Overall, I've had 34 first watches so far this year. And I will say that list includes Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, and just leave it at that. The oldest movie I've seen is 1922's The Toll of the Sea, which is important historically but problematic on multiple levels. 

Here was 2025's final list. I ended up not ranking them last year, and that may be the case again this year! 

Tim Curry tribute post

With Tim Curry dying hours after Dolly Parton, I didn't want to let the week end without writing something in appreciation of Curry, too. But I don't really have any Curry ephemera, so I had to figure out what to post.

Then I remembered my newspaper's first local review of The Rocky Horror Picture Show phenomenon.

Jon Ferguson, whom I worked alongside for a few years when I joined the newspaper in 2014, wrote "The Theater Darkens, And Crowd Lights Up" for the Lancaster Intelligence Journal's Lifebeat section on April 6, 1979. As far I can tell from searching the archives, it's the first time Curry's picture appeared in the newspaper in something other than a movie advertisement for a midnight showing.

Curry isn't even mentioned by name in Ferguson's article (only Susan Sarandon gets that honor), but there are some interesting comments, nonetheless. Please remember that this is 1979 in ultra-conservative Lancaster County (current home of America's measles revival); the fact that Rocky Horror was showing in Amish country at all is kind of stunning. Ferguson writes:

• The fool foolish enough to wear his Sunday best was quickly warned as he stepped down the aisle. "You wore a suit to the wrong movie," a voice hidden in the darkness of the theater called out.
• "It's not the movie that provides the show, it's the audience. Don't expect the crowd to sit placidly back in silence as this trifle of a film about a 'sweet transexual from Transylvania' unfolds."
• "Basically, the movie focuses on the debauching of an innocent young couple at the hands of Dr. Frank N. Further, the travestite from the planet Transexual in the galaxy of Transylvania, and his demented minions. The plot is next to invisible, the acting reaches new heights of campiness and there is no hint of social redeeming value. But criticisms of this sort have no place when discussing 'Rocky Horror.' The movie is unto itself, and the same goes for its audience."

Last year, Sarah Nicell had some more contemporary insights when writing a column on the movie's 50th anniversary for LNP | LancasterOnline:

"Much about the movie is outdated, even if it pushed boundaries for its time. There are corny, blood-drip transitions and fourth wall breaks. Frank-N-Furter, the host of the castle played by Tim Curry, sings a seductive song about being a “Sweet Transvestite” from his home planet of 'Transexual' in the galaxy of 'Transylvania.' (It’s unclear in the film whether the character identifies with the antiquated term because he’s a cross-dresser or for his alien heritage. Perhaps it’s both.) The same character tricks his virginal guests into non-consensual sexual encounters. Alien siblings have an implied incestuous relationship. ... The movie is, regardless of the year you watch it, absurd. It is offensive and strange. Some lyrics are nonsensical, and the camera work is shaky."

Ahh well.

Personally, I think "Don't Dream It, Be It" is about as clear and sensible as you can get for a lyric that has been embraced by what is now generations of queer fans.

I also like the summary in Steve Appleford's Curry appreciation for the Los Angeles Times: "No one was ever bored watching Tim Curry onscreen."

To that end, Ashar and I greatly enjoyed watching Curry in 1980's Times Square and 1990's The Hunt for Red October the past two nights as we honored his memory. We're planning to watch Annie and Clue in the coming days. And, having seen some stills, we'd like to track down his 1978 British six-part series Will Shakespeare. 

1978 book on "misappreciated" American films

(Please pardon Snugs' disinterested yawn.)

I found this book a couple of years ago in Bookman's. It's a 1978 hardcover put out by the Royal Film Archive of Belgium with the unwieldy title The Most Important and Misappreciated American Films Since the Beginning of Cinema.

Basically, it's a book of lists of important films, but also of lesser-discussed movies. Right up my alley.

The preface by Jacques Ledoux of the Royal Film Archive of Belgium lays out the book's mission:

"Most written histories of cinema are full of cliches and the attentive reader is easily able to single out those films which the historian has not recently seen or of which he writes second hand. And how could it be otherwise, since so many films remain inaccessible to researchers, often for geographical reasons?

"On the other hand, it could be imagined that the results of an enquiry such as that offered in this volume, with more than two hundred specialists participating from twenty-two countries, would lead to a statistical judgment of greater reliability than an individual historical appreciation. ...

"Still ... we were wary of ending up with a banal list of obvious classics. In order to avoid this, we decided to ask each participant to compile two lists: one, limited quite arbitrarily to thirty titles, and films considered the most important; the other, not limited in number, of films considered misappreciated. It was also specified that the films were to be cited without any order of preference and that no account need be taken of date of production, genre, or length."

The final list of Most Important Films is indeed fairly banal, with the best inclusion, in my opinion, being F.W. Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) and the most unsurprising and frustrating inclusion being D.W. Griffith's racist Lost Cause of the Confederacy epic The Birth of a Nation (1915).

The Top 10 vote-getters looked like this: 

1. Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles)
2. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927, F.W. Murnau)
3. Greed (1924, Erich von Stroheim)
4. Intolerance (1916, D.W. Griffith)
5. The Birth of a Nation (1915, D.W. Griffith)
6. Singin' in the Rain (1952, Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly)
7. Nanook of the North (1922, Robert J. Flaherty)
8. The General (1926, Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman)
9. The Gold Rush (1925, Charlie Chaplin)
10. The Crowd (1928, King Vidor)

This is a good place to add that I scanned the list of the book's 203 respondents and only 15 stood out to me as obviously being women. The actual number is probably a bit higher, because there are a lot of non-American names, but I doubt it's more than about 20 — so, 10%. Bah, humbug!

The true value and fascination of this book is in the respondents' lists of "misappreciated" films along with, in some instances, their commentaries on those lists. It's a wealth of movie titles to scan for little-known gems — little-known even in this day and age of physical media and online streaming, when more movies from throughout history than ever before are available to the casual viewer.

I don't know what "Misappreciated" means (more on that from Jonathan Rosenbaum in a moment), but here are some films I was happy to see listed:

• The Night of the Hunter (1955, perhaps the most frequently cited film)
• Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
• Titicut Follies (1967)
• Easy Street (1917)
• The Pawnbroker (1965)
• Trash (1970)
• The Son of Frankenstein (1939)
• Johnny Guitar (1954)
• Night Nurse (1931)
• The Seventh Victim (1943)
• The Haunting (1963)
• Nashville (1975)
• Ace in the Hole (1951)
• Salt of the Earth (1953)
• Lonesome (1928)

A surprising number of horror films make these lists, only some of which are listed above. It's better, I guess, to be respected as "misappreciated" than to not be mentioned at all. Film noirs also tended to do very well on the "misappreciated" lists, including Kiss Me Deadly and Gun Crazy.

More importantly, the "misappreciated" lists include many films that are new to me and browsing this book takes me down many happy rabbit holes.

American critic Jonathan Rosenbaum was one of those who submitted a list for the book. Reflecting on the process in a 2024 post on his blog, he wrote:

"By 'misappreciated,' I’m sure that what was meant was 'underrated'. I find that I still agree to a surprising degree with many of my judgments in the mid-70s – including even my belief that Hollywood at the time was going through one of its more meager periods (even though Pauline Kael and many of her disciples seemed to think, and some of them apparently still think, that this was the richest period Hollywood has ever had in its entire history)."

I disagree with Rosenbaum's thought on 1970s American film, especially given the mostly tepid decades that preceded it, but that's the fun of discussing movies and movie history! (I also have a great love for watching 1970s movies, documentaries and TV, so I'm biased.) 

You can read Rosenbaum's list of most important films on his blog post, but I'm sharing his "misappreciated" list here:

• Me and My Gal (1932)
• Her Man (1930)
• Judge Priest (1934)
• Rope (1948)
• The Trouble with Harry (1955)
• Park Row (1952)
• The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (1952)
• The Old Dark House (1932)
• The Woman on the Beach (1947)
• The Seventh Victim (1943)
• Sylvia Scarlett (1936)
• Black and Tan (1929)
• Such Good Friends (1972)
• Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)
• The Young One (1960)
• Family Plot (1976)
• Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969)

Several of these I haven't seen. I strongly agree with The Old Dark House and The Seventh Victim. And with Make Way for Tomorrow, the film that inspired Tokyo Story. The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T is a one-of-a-kind fantasy that is way too hokey for me at times but deserves credit for translating the imagination of Dr. Seuss into a live-action picture. Rosenbaum writes more about his love for it, much of which is nostalgia-based, in a separate post.

Giving schoolchildren a proper monster education in 1976

Fifty years ago, in our bicentennial year of 1976, Scholastic published an amazeballs guide to monsters. School was just cooler then, wasn't it? Movie monsters, mythical creatures and cryptids could be mixed into the lesson plans alongside multiplication tables, the metric system and spelling quizzes. I'm guessing Pennywise, Slender Man and the backrooms don't get that same treatment today, but what do I know? 

Well, what I do know is that this 32-page staplebound booklet rocks. I mean, it has Blacula (William Marshall) right there in the center of the cover, alongside such icons as Lon Chaney Jr., Medusa, Frankenstein's monster and King Kong. Fredric March's Hyde gets a very prominent spot, as does one of the Village of the Damned kiddos. 

What a cover! According to the credits, it was designed by Bonnie Bishop, who also served as the booklet's overall designer and art director. Some of Bishop's papers ended up at the University of New England Library, which notes that she had loved drawing, writing and making books ever since childhood and later became a full-time book artist. That love shows on this cover.

Let's hear it for the rest of the booklet's production crew, too. Lewis Gardner (1943-2020) was the editor and contributed a poem and a short story. Katherine Robinson was the supervising editor and Eve Sennett was the production editor. Ira Peck and Margaret Ronan handled some of the writing, which included retellings of classic horror stories. As a teenager, Ronan corresponded with H.P. Lovecraft (!!) according to the website Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein, and those letters informed some of her work at Scholastic.

In addition to those already mentioned, this book pictures and/or mentions the big-headed alien from 1957's Invasion of the Saucermen, Paul Wegener's 1920 performance as the Golem, the Loch Ness Monster, The Thing from Another World, Cat People, Bigfoot, zombies (but only the kind who obey masters — Romero's flesh-munching zombies might have been a bit much), The Incredible Shrinking Man and Michael Landon's teenage werewolf. 

There are photos of both Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee as Dracula. The book doesn't sugarcoat Lugosi's life for the young audience. Ronan notes: "When Lugosi was 70, he admitted to being a drug addict. He kicked the habit in a hospital. A year later, he died. He had no money left from his days as a monster star. About all he had left was his Dracula cape. So he was buried in it."

The last page of the book is titled "People and Monsters" and has this introductory paragraph: "Why do some people believe in monsters? And why are monster stories popular? Here are some possible answers. Which ones do you think are true?" There are then 11 short paragraphs, all of which seem plausible but some of which are very bizarre for a school activity book:

• Some people fear others who are strange looking or deformed. They may have trouble seeing such people as fully human. They may believe such people have special powers and are evil.
• Drugs have been used in magic and religious ceremonies. After taking drugs, people have seen monsters. They have also imagined themselves as having supernatural powers.
• Monsters usually do horrible things. Deep within us, we may wish to do horrible things. Normal people keep these wishes under control. They may not even be aware of having such wishes. But they may enjoy hearing about monsters that break human laws.

If you're hankering to get your hands on one of these absolute-gem booklets, there's an eBay seller who apparently has a whole stash and is selling them for $12.99. It's well worth the trip down monster memory lane.

 

WKBS-TV bumper-palooza

I'm in a Facebook group in which folks share memories of the old WKBS-TV (Channel 48) out of Burlington, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. (I've mentioned this group before on Papergreat.) In recent months, users have been sharing and commenting upon a wide variety of bumpers that were used by the station, mostly in the 1970s.

I want to reshare them here for posterity, to give them a greater opportunity to be preserved. They are indeed amazing and bring back a lot of memories. Almost all of these were originally shared with the Facebook group by either Ed Yungmann or Susan Keiser. They should be lauded for their preservation efforts!