Required Reading: Universal Horrors and The Monster Show

You know, film history is such a broad topic that it's hard to pinpoint the best books on the subject, even within a genre.  But I'm going to try...

First, you've got to know the classics.  And the true classics of horror are, for the most part, Universal Horrors- Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man.  Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas and John Brunas  do an exhaustive study  of the Universal Studio's horror and monster films, including the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies.  These movies didn't just start a horror boom in the thirties and forties, but they also provided the core of the Shock Theatre syndication package for television, giving rise to Forrest Ackerman's magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland, and instilling a love of the genre into Monster Kids all over America.

At $55, Universal Horrors is a little expensive for the casual fan, but it's so data rich to give hours of browsing pleasure- it's broken down film by film, so you can just read about a single movie at a time.

Of course, other studios had their classics- RKO and King Kong, Warner Brothers and Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, and David Skal's The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror covers those as well as silent movies, the Universal canon, and covers nearly a centuries worth of the genre, including the fifties Bug monsters and the slasher films of the seventies and eighties.

The important thing about the Monster show is the fact that it puts the films into a cultural perspective, be it the Great Depression, The Cold War or the Counter Culture, looking not only what the influenced the genre, but what the genre influenced as well.

Skal also wrote the definitive history of Universal's Dracula, Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web ofDracula from Novel to Stage to Screen, and a companion volume focusing on Dracula's director, Tod Browning, Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, Hollywood's Master of the Macabre with Elias Savada.

I'm going to try and get on a more consistent posting schedule and I think I'll be focusing on books on Mondays.  Thanks for reading!