Total Recall

Nick Setchfield on something that made him shiver: his Monsters Of The Movies book.

Nick Setchfield, features editor

Take a look at that cover, thrillseekers. Frankenstein. Dracula. King Kong. The Invisible Man. The nameless yet unmistakable silhouette of the Hunchback of Notre Dame. And there, dead centre, staring out with eyes the colour of blood, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, captured cop shop mugshot style. It’s like a hoarding for the ultimate carnival freakshow.

Published in 1977, Carousel’s Monsters Of The Movies was a paperback bestiary, treasured by a generation of neophyte horror nuts. It was a gift for any kid with an itch for film history and a place in their heart for the creatures of the night, the ones that came out to play in the late, spectral hours of BBC Two. Some entries were compellingly obscure: Count Yorga? Manster? The Electric Man? Who were these fiends?

Not that the book delivers any backstage lore beyond titles and dates. Denis Gifford retells the plots of these films in the style of a storybook, breathless but authoritative: “But to make quite certain he cut off her head.” Entries begin with snatches of scripture, old proverbs, ancient curses; verisimilitude bolted onto bullshit. Some of it reads like cracked beat poetry: “They creep in the dark, the unholy two, one an ape, the other an ape and not an ape, a man and not a man.” Hello there, The Ape Man ( 1942).

In truth it’s all about the pictures. The cover may have a lurid, ghost train allure but the full- page monster portraits inside are stark monochrome. Well, theoretically – many of these images are grainy, faded, streaked ghost- grey, hinting at troubling ink shortages at the printers. They look like pages of a punk fanzine. They look like photocopies of nightmares.

It ends with The Zombie from Hammer’s The Plague Of The Zombies. It’s the only picture that genuinely scared me. I’m still haunted by those pin- prick pupils, putrescent leer and cemetery gaze. There’s no comforting goodbye from Gifford, no reassuring ads for The Carousel Book Of Pony Trekking or Discovering Rockpools. Just the words “Then they turned on their master…” and, overleaf, two blank pages, as empty as the grave.

Quick. Close the book. Or the monsters win.