Book Review: Classics of the Horror Film by William K. Everson
I’ve mentioned before that as a teenager, I had rather morbid tastes in entertainment. This naturally led to an interest in the horror genre. This fascination has never entirely left me, as you can tell from the many horror-tinged reviews I’ve done for this blog. But these things are relative. I watch more horror movies than the average person by a fairly wide margin, but I know people who are true horror flick fans that I can draw upon for information on the most obscure or never-on-video movies. Back in the 1970s, though, I had to rely on books such as the one in hand today.
William K. Everson was a film historian and preservationist who helped save many rare movies and produced fine programme notes for them. So he’d seen a lot of movies, often repeatedly, and was well-versed in the subject.
Most of the book is discussion/reviews of movies in roughly a chronological order, starting with the 1925 silent The Phantom of the Opera and up through the 1940s. More recent films are mentioned when they are related. At the back, there’s discussion of films by category, like vampires, werewolves and lastly “possession” so that Mr. Everson can finish with a discussion of The Exorcist, still in theaters at the time of writing, very popular, but too new to be considered a “classic.”
In the introduction, one of the topics discussed is that it can be hard to say just what is a “classic” in the horror genre. Many of the movies discussed are at best flawed gems, while others are only “classics” because of one strong feature such as a particularly good script or performance or camera work, or being the first of a given type. A couple were “lost media” even back in the 1970s, so Mr. Everson has to guesstimate what they were like.
The many black and white photographs liven up the dense text. A nostalgic buzz comes from Mr. Everson’s distaste for the increased emphasis on gore and sex in horror films of the Seventies; one can only imagine how he’d feel about the movies of the 2020s! He’s notably also not keen on the Japanese efforts in the horror genre–all the kaiju movies are a footnote in his discussion of King Kong, and he wasn’t enthusiastic about Kwaidan either, mentioning it only as part of a review of a British ghost story anthology movie.
If there’s one major flaw in the book, it’s the lack of an index–since several movies are discussed only in reviews of other movies, it can be hard to find them.
I fondly remember running across this book in the library as a teen, and the thrill of reading about all these cool old movies (I’ve now seen over half, and some of them I’ve reviewed on this very blog.) Happily, a younger relative found this volume in a used bookstore and recognized it as just the sort of thing Uncle SKJAM! would appreciate.
Both this and the follow-up volume, More Classics of the Horror Film, are highly recommended to fans of the genre. Check out libraries and used bookstores near you!
