Denis Gifford’s A Pictorial History Of Horror Movies was the first movie-related book I ever bought. This would have been back in the 70s. It was quite instrumental, in retrospect, in me developing a love of movies in general, and horror movies in particular. I still have my copy!

Author Gifford shows great affection for the old Universal monster movies, which is matched only by his disdain for Hammer’s output (dismissed with just a couple of photos and a few sentences).  So this is very much a ‘golden-age only’ overview of the horror genre. But it has such reverence for the Chaney, Lugosi and Karloff movies and so many great photos from those movies that I can forgive that. There have since been countless books on many different aspects of the horror genre (and I have a fair number of them) – ranging from scholarly dissertations to graphic gore-fests, but this was the grand-daddy of them all. 

I subsequently bought the four slim paperbacks shown here from Lorrimer books. I’ve written elsewhere about how I came to own The House of Horror book (all about Hammer Films). The others I picked up over the years. Cinema of Mystery is dedicated to films based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe, and given that is a relatively limited field to begin with it is a very slim volume.  The other two (on vampire and zombie movies respectively) are fairly self-explanatory.