From Zombos' Closet

Movie Pressbook: The House That Screamed (1969)

Movie Pressbook: Abby (1974)

Movie Pressbook: Dracula's Daughter (1936)

Not sure if I've got all the pages in this Xeroxed copy of the large-sized Dracula's Daughter pressbook, but the fold-out Showmanship pages are exquisitely dense with promotion ideas. I had to split them into sections in order to scan them at a readable resolution, but I provided the complete page-spread to show you how it looks (top and bottom). Possibly the most unusual movie in Universal's horror cycle, even the promotion stresses the "weird feeling" she will give you.

(Note: Due to the large size of the pressbook, each page was originally Xeroxed into two halves. Unfortunately, whoever did the Xeroxing mismatched the resolution between the two halves of page 3, so they do not line up properly. I rescaled them as best I could. Also, deterioration at the fold  has removed a line of text through the columns of pages 2 and 3.) 

 

Movie Pressbook: Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962)

I had to split a few single pages into two scans, in order to make them readable, so this 11 x 17 inches pressbook, printed in landscape orientation, shows more pages than it actually contains. The poster art is to die for. Journey to the Seventh Planet is one of my guilty favorites as a youngster. I never failed to watch it when it was on network television. One interesting tidbit: Roger Corman's Galaxy of Terror uses the same plot device: space men encountering their worst fears on a distant planet.

Movie Pressbook: House of Horrors (1946)

Here's another Xerox, this one of the House of Horrors pressbook from Professor Kinema's file folder. Unfortunately it's in black and white, and the reproduction is poor. I'm also not sure if this is all the pages to the original, but still an interesting look into the Universal Studios promotion machine, nonetheless. And besides, it has the Creeper himself, Rondo Hatton, and that's enough for me. (Check out the lobby cut-out of The Creeper!)

 

Movie Pressbook: Rocket Attack U.S.A (1961)

The propagandist and terror-pandering cover art of this Rocket Attack U.S.A pressbook immediately caught my eye. I'm a sucker for anything exploitative and seedy. The depressing tagline, You'll live, MAYBE!!! could be used in just about any horror movie. The fears played on here are more real, though, especially if you lived through the Cold War and the Red Menace. 

Movie Pressbook: The Human Vapor (1960)

I moved the newspaper article-styled pages ahead of the poster ad mats, but all the pages are here from this splendid 11 x 15 inches campaign book for Toho Studios' The Human Vapor. 

Movie Pressbook: Sugar Hill (1974)

I moved the ad pages around to provide a little reading variety between them and the text pages, so you will notice the page numbers are not in proper order. Otherwise the entire 8.5 x 14 inches pressbook is shown in its entirety. I hope Quentin Tarantino remakes this one.

Book Review: 21st Century Dead, A Zombie Anthology

Zombos Says: Good

It strikes me rather funny that the zombie zeitgeist, whether embodied as motif, foil, philosophical popsicle, commercial breadbasket, or cultural handkerchief, can be played either bloody raw or quietly contrite or humorously to deadpan highbrow. Zombies give you more bang for the grue-buck than any other bete noire in the fictional monster canon.

Editor Christopher Golden assembles an ensemble of despairing stories that play down the zombies and play up the troubled living coping (or not) with the undead's immediate threat or the longer term wreckage of the social order; not much gore or frenzied fighting and dying goes on within these pages, except for a few stories, because Golden is more concerned with the bummed out living's thoughts and feelings in an absurd world that makes daily life a make or break proposition.

Jonathan Maberry's Jack and Jillneatly measures action with emotional depth as his young people, Jack and Jill, are engulfed by the inner turmoil of Jack's cancer, the flooding from a torrential downpour, and their neighbors turning into chompers. It's one big slide atop a "black wave" and Maberry manages his words' rhythm in tandem with the situation's escalation of the distress and hysteria accompanying Jack and Jill's confusion, desperation, and ultimate surrender to the inevitable. Blood is spilled, guns are fired, and people die, but our attention is focused more on how Jack and Jill will survive than how they are going to die. Jack and Jill is one of the longer stories in this anthology yet it moves quickly and provides a familiar environment to become uncomfortable in.

Antiparallelogram by Amber Benson provides a less familiar landscape and a more cerebral storyline, although one that is still charged with emotional depth. Her obfuscatory style melds a future society, leveled into the have, the have-nots, and zombies to cope with, which is probably why designer drugs are used to palliate the social discrepancies and expected disruptions. Told in the first person, can we trust the narrator? Even the narrator's gender is not fully made clear, although a wife is mentioned; actually an undead person who is or isn't, but still familiar enough to burn memories. More vexing is Benson's anti-climax that leaves us with a beginning to the story instead of an ending, making Antiparallelogram feel like it was taken from the middle of a novel length idea, but here's the short story instead.

There is one humorous story, Reality Bites, from S. G. Browne. While the anthology is heaped to the brim with gloom and doom, Browne explores the advantages of reality television when zombies--non-carnivorous ones!--become the plentiful and amply moribund contestants in a host of shows. The downside is this reality doesn't bite enough: those befuddled zombies just rot and plop and pucker, making all those shows a repository for doldrums. Imagine how great it would be to have one zombie who, through stringent use of cologne and deodorant--and the occasional consumption of human flesh--remains looking like a living and breathing person. And he can even think, too! While Browne doesn't pull out all the social props to make his story as bitingly satirical as it could probably be, he does mine enough humor from the possibilities, making his story a welcome relief tucked in-between all the other 21st century dead's moroseness.

The Dead of Dromore stands out as the oddity and perhaps most experimental of the ensemble. Paragraphs trickle down the page in snips of words, in such a way I wondered if Ken Bruen was attempting some complex poetic structure or tonal haiku. One ex-marine with no scruples and four apprentices with even less scramble around "infecteds." Dromore may be overun, but the worst of it doesn't come from the infecteds. The pace is quick, the verbiage brief, and the tense motions between rescue and escape fail to achieve our involvement. Characters remain unchanged (except for that anticipated shift from living to undead inherent in zombie stories, of course), and events unfold in expected ways: you've read all this before, just not presented in this way.

More stories reside in 21st Century Dead: zombies with brain chips to control them for domestic service; families coping with zombie relatives; computer games wiring into human terminals; soldiers wired by parasitic mechanoids; and still more. Many of the stories seem unfinished, or perhaps a better way to put is they read like smaller parts taken from a larger whole, bringing us into the middle, or the end, or somewhere else within their stories, leaving you with a sweet tooth for more closure. Then again, with zombies, there is never any real closure, is there?

Movie Pressbook: The Brides of Fu Manchu (1966)

How can you pass up such a catchy tagline: The Master of Evil Takes a Harem of Horror! Or Better Dead Than Wed! Now, of course, questions of political correctness and cultural sensitivity always crop up when one discusses the Fu Manchu series. Feel free to comment. As for me, I'll just mention it is one of Christopher Lee's meatier roles, so I won't ignore it. (I recommend reading Sax Rohmer's books, too.)

Movie Pressbook: Indestructible Man (1956)

Who says you can't learn new things from pressbooks? What's a funicular? Yes, that's right, you haven't a clue, do you? Well, check page four...On another note, I'm perplexed by collectors, like Jeffrey M. Peck (see page three) who must ink their name on everything with a stamper. I simply do not understand the need for defacing paper collectibles in this way.

Boris Karloff in Jack Pierce's Makeup Chair

Photos courtesy of Professor Kinema (Jim Knusch). Note: I believe the photos were taken at different times and for different makeups, based on the hairstyles and how Jack Pierce is dressed, so no sequential order is implied.