Gifford D. A Pictorial History of Horror Movies

Hamlyn, 1977. — 216 p. — ISBN: 0600369269.Comprehensive overview of the horror movie genre. Fully illustrated with great photographs.They were giants in the night: two tall men in two tall hats who swung out and away from each other and came at me, striding from the colossal window. And if I hadn't screamed and ducked under the seat they would have trampled me into the ice-cream wrappers. The site was the outsize Trocadero Cinema at the Elephant and Castle, London; the sight was no more than two top-hatted toffs, probably Jack Hulbert and Jack Buchanan, bidding themselves bye-bye; the night was the winter of 1930; the mite was yours truly the horror film fan; and the fright was simply dimensional - magnification plus depth. I in my three-year-old innocence was reacting classically to the concept of cinema, just as those first, older innocents had shrieked and shied from old Lumiere's film of an oncoming engine, back in the beyond of 1895.
My early movie memories are all of horror: a long rifle nosing through the flap of a big top tent to pick off a man on a flying trapeze; two cowboys slugging away in the back of a jolting lorry as it racketed around a rocky mountain; a zoom into the open mouth of a cartoon character to see a similar face grimacing on its uvula. Horrid moments, yet not horror films.