Tweet Milestone: McF book on silent horror, sci fi and fantasy

As many of you may know, led by John Soister, Henry Nicolella, Bill Chase, Harry Long and I have been toiling away on a book covering U.S. feature-length silent horror, science fiction and fantasy films. Recently we hit a milestone; our 300th essay is ready to go! Now this project has taken longer than anybody could have foreseen (about 6 years give or take). But there’s a reason for that. If the film was based upon a short story, novel or play, we tried to read it for background. If the film was known to exist (even only at archives), we tried to get a firsthand account. Naturally, we’ve dug up scores of interesting reviews but we also attempted to produce pertinent commentary along the way. ..stuff like how the picture fit into the trends (film-wise, genre-wise and current event-wise) of the time, biographical sketches on key contributors, etc. Each film is covered as extensively as possible; many of them have not been previously covered in depth or even at all. And the book will have illustrations. We’ve still got about 50 or so titles to cover and we’re a year or so away from completion. It’s coming from McFarland.

Steve Joyce

Sounds like a must-have book, Steve. I look forward to it.

[Christopher Jacobs]

Will you be covering the recent silent horror films CALL OF CTHULHU (2005) or PROMETHEUS TRIUMPHANT: A FUGUE IN THE KEY OF FLESH (2008)?

Both do admirable jobs of recreating the look of silent cinema, and both have gotten at least some distribution and can be found on DVD with a little searching. There may be other latter-day attempts at reviving silent horror worth mentioning, as well.

--Christopher Jacobs
http://hpr1.com/film
http://www.und.edu/instruct/cjacobs

Will you be covering the recent silent horror films CALL OF CTHULHU (2005) or PROMETHEUS TRIUMPHANT: A FUGUE IN THE KEY OF FLESH (2008)?

Both do admirable jobs of recreating the look of silent cinema, and both have gotten at least some distribution and can be found on DVD with a little searching. There may be other latter-day attempts at reviving silent horror worth mentioning, as well.

--Christopher Jacobs
http://hpr1.com/film
http://www.und.edu/instruct/cjacobs

I got Call of Cthulhu from Netflix recently, and enjoyed it a lot. It gets almost everything right. Oddly, one thing that stood out for me was the lack of patterned wall paper on sets for offices and bedrooms. I guess it's hard to find rooms that still have it! But the makeup, costumes, use of intertitles and documents, and acting style I thought were just about perfect. The desk calendar was a very clever "silent film" solution for showing how the investigator lines up all of the weird events, day by day. Fake "old film damage" is usually way overdone, but here it was very subtle, with occasional speckles and dust, and once or twice a small hair in the gate. The fake ocean waves in the lifeboat scenes totally fooled me until I watched the "making of" documentary. The zoom lens was occasionally unfortunate -- there's a subtle difference between zooms and dolly shots -- but it wouldn't bother most people.

And I would have had Cthulhu Himself move a little more slowly to convey a better impression of size. But this is a much better silent film than I would ever be able to make, and much more authentic looking than the fake silent film in Almodovar's "Talk to Her," which I'm sure had a much higher budget. So thumbs up. Very nice music, too.

And I would have had Cthulhu Himself move a little more slowly to convey a better impression of size.

I got the impression that the eeny-teeny, not-very-terrifying, clearly stuffed-toy Ravening Elder God was deliberate, a homage to so many horror films where the Demonic Whatsit is a big letdown when you finally see it.

But other than that, I'd agree with you, it's a very good modern silent, tongue-in-cheek but not irritatingly so.

Will you be covering the recent silent horror films CALL OF CTHULHU (2005) or PROMETHEUS TRIUMPHANT: A FUGUE IN THE KEY OF FLESH (2008)?

We've had to limit our parameters somewhere on an effort this large. Alas, nothing after the silent era; serials and shorts are excluded too.

Steve

PS I agree with your comments on CALL OF CTHULHU. I'm going to have to check out PROMETHEUS TRIUMPHANT.

http://www.amazon.com/American-Science- ... Promotions

Given the hefty price McFarland is asking, I'm hoping most of the 2000+ page manuscript we turned in will make the final cut.
Henry Nicolella

http://www.amazon.com/American-Science-Fiction-Fantasy-1913-1929/dp/078643581X/ref=sr_1_5_det?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1306520195&sr=1-5#productPromotions

Given the hefty price McFarland is asking, I'm hoping most of the 2000+ page manuscript we turned in will make the final cut.
Henry Nicolella

Price: $125.00

Ouch! I guess this book is aimed directly at libraries.

I can understand that this is a niche market, but OUCH....!!!!

125.00 with no guarantee that the items from John Soister are not
pulled directly from his previous books...?

Pass.

"no guarantee that the items from John Soister are not
pulled directly from his previous books...? "

There are 367 essays on the individual films and none of them have seen print before. In his "Up from the Vault", John did do pieces on "The Unknown Purple", "The Monkey Talks" and a few others but he did not write the essays on them for this new book.
Yeah, it's a hefty price (not set by us, needless to say) but the book's encyclopedic in scope (and length) and I'm sure it will find its readership. And there's always the library.
Henry Nicolella

Only 367 essays? A mere 6-7 years of labor?

Slackers!

Looking forward to it... Actually $125 doesn't seem that bad, considering some of the things I've spent more on.... I do hope all the entries get included though, and McFarland doesn't decide that, say, 200 essays is all the market can stand....

After a number of delays, the book is finally available: http://www.mcfarlandbooks.com/book-2.ph ... 864-3581-4
Things have changed a bit. It's now in 2 volumes, soft cover and the price is $95. It runs some 800 pages total; McFarland had no problem with the length and didn't suggest cutting anything down.
Henry Nicolella

Congratulations!

~Roger

I'll be ordering soon!