Trashfiend: Disposable Horror Culture of the 1960s & 1970s

656 Pages·2009·14.61 MB·English

by  Scott Stine

Trashfiend
Disposable horror fare of the 1960s & 1970s
Volume One
Scott Stine
www.headpress.com
Table of Contents
Up from the Depths • Preface
Articles
The Darker Side of Soul Cinema: The Creature Features of Black Cinema
The Ghouls Go West: The Horror Westerns of William Beaudine
Pat Boyette’s & Dungeon of Harrow
The Mad, Mad, Mad Monsters of Rankin & Bass
Blood on the Canvas: The Art of the Belgian Window Card
Those Marvelous Monsters: A Look at Marvel Comics’ Horror Magazines
Digesting The Haunt of Horror
Cut Down to Size: The Golden Age of Horror Digest Magazines
Monsters on Parade: Shriek! The Monster Horror Magazine
Warren’s Hastily Erected House Of Horror
Reel Monsters: Collecting 8mm Horror Films
Wally Wood’s Mars Attacks!
Monsterabilia
Sleepless in Seattle: Up all Night with Nightmare Theatre
Interviews
Cal Bolder: The Boy Toy of Frankenstein’s Daughter
Dredging Crater Lake with Richard Cardella
John Stanley’s Nightmare in Blood
The Twisted Tales of Bruce Jones
Keeping an Eye on The Count: Chuck Lindenberg, camera one
Sweeping up after The Count: Dave Drui, floor director
Film Reviews
It’s Only a Movie
It’s Only a Black Horror Movie
Billy the Kid vs Dracula (1965) & Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter
(1965)
The Crater Lake Monster (1977)
Nightmare in Blood (1975)
Dungeon of Harrow (1962)
Mad Monster Party? (1967) & Mad, Mad, Mad Monsters (1972)
Appendix
Pat Boyette: selected horror comic checklist (1966–79)
Bruce Jones: selected horror magazine checklist (1968–79)
The Haunt of Horror digest index (1973)
Marvel monster magazine checklist (1964–79)
Marvel monster magazine artist & writer index (1964–79)
Horror fiction digest checklist (1960–79)
Shriek! magazine index (1965–67)
Warren’s House of Horror (1978)
Mars Attacks! trading cards checklist (1962)
Wally Wood: horror comics & magazines checklist (1950–79)
Sources
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Index
Trashfiend publication information
I
N SPRING OF 2002, I self published the first issue of Trashfiend under my
Stigmata Press imprint, a forty eight page tribute to ‘Horror & Exploitation Fare
from the 1960s & 1970s.’ With a modest print run of 2,000 copies, and sporting
an underexposed but garish full color cover, Trashfiend picked up where its
predecessor GICK! left off the previous year. Although far more comprehensive
than the earlier incarnation, the primary thing that set Trashfiend apart was its
unwavering devotion to media that left the greatest impression on me as a child.
I had grown tired of more recent fare, which had become evident in the gradual
decline of post 1980 coverage in GICK! (When I did review such films, I rarely
had anything good to say about them… unless, of course, they were throwbacks
to the stuff that made up the cinematic soundtrack of my youth.) If any
incarnation of the magazine were to survive, I had to be inspired by or at least
marginally interested in the material covered within its pages. Even if many of
the films and comics I wrote about were, well, trash, at least it was trash that was
near and dear to my heart.
In the editorial that kicked off the first issue of Trashfiend, I made a sincere
but ultimately feeble attempt to explain the main impetus behind the magazine’s
conception: nostalgia. But it wasn’t until I was wrapping up this book that I
found myself one step closer to truly understanding the great cosmic force that
makes the crustiest curmudgeons shuck their catch-all bah, humbug’s and sigh in
fond remembrance of days past. I was in the midst of writing the piece that
closes this book, ‘Sleeplessness in Seattle,’ when I found myself caught up in
something more than casual reminiscence. I was trying desperately to save a part
of my childhood that, unlike many of the things covered in this book, was
slipping through the cracks of popular history. With an unprecedented urgency, I
was soon consumed by the need to archive every scrap of data and trivia about
this childhood obsession that I could unearth. My previous efforts to preserve all
things vintage horror paled in comparison to the machinations that drove my
most recent obsession. I had discovered my grail, my ark of the covenant… even
if friends and family alike thought it high time I purchase a one-way ticket to the
bughouse, I felt justified.
As adults, we rarely experience the awe we took for granted as children. As
we grow older, we gradually become more desperate to relive such moments,
and we find that only through the very things that sparked our collective
imaginations as children can we even come close to this now-elusive
wonderment. For me, and probably many of the people reading this, it was
monsters and everything devoted to them: films, comics, toys, movie magazines,
what have you. That, of course, is a goodly part of what Trashfiend entails. But
this beast has a particularly dark underbelly: stained and matted nether regions
sullied by its need to wallow in the blood and the muck. As some of us grew up,
the unattainable ‘mature’ horrors that our impressionable minds were mostly
spared became our newfound sirens, our need to seek out their forbidden
pleasures fueled by the very fact they were once taboo. Anything that hid behind
an R rating, or was placed on the top shelf of the magazine rack beyond our
adolescent reach, had to be something special. As horror fans, we were always
looking for something new to shock our jaded sensibilities, so it was our very
nature to grasp at things concerned adults did not want us to see.
After seeing these examples of Rick Baker’s effects work for The Incredible
Melting Man (1977), this film capped my Top Ten Most Wanted list for years.
Starlog #11 (January 1978) Starlog Communications
Most of the things considered taboo in our society are labeled as such
because they appeal to our basest nature, and they are often summed up with the
lowest common denominators of sex and violence. Despite the fact these
distasteful subjects are the cornerstones of American entertainment, they bear a
stigma that forces respectable producers and publishers to peddle their wares in a
more socially acceptable fashion lest they be compared to tapeworms or other
unsavory parasites that inhabit one’s lower intestinal tract.
Due to its inextricable ties with these taboos, the horror genre has always
shared this stigma, but never more so than during the sixties and seventies when
—excuse the mixed metaphor—it pushed the envelope and exploited the
inability of weary censors to assert any real control over the breached floodgates.
And since the entrepreneurs who capitalized on the growing market for titillation
and bloodshed produced their lurid product as cheaply as humanly possible,
much of it was and is viewed as ‘trash’ by the general consensus. Although I
would be hard pressed to consider Warren Publications or the writings of Robert
Bloch and Leslie Whitten as garbage, the fact that they are horror automatically
relegates them to the position of disposable entertainment in the eyes of many