Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies 1956–1984
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"[ Edgar Wallace ] began writing in 1905, at the height of the period of uncertainty that also influenced the works of Feuillade and Gaston Leroux." --Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies 1956-1984, p. 13 |
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Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies 1956-1984 (1994) is a non fiction book on European horror films by Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs. The book covers European exploitation cinema and sexploitation before the introduction of home video. It has profiles of Jesús Franco, José Larraz, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Rollin, Walerian Borowczyk and Jose Bénazéraf.
Minor figures included are Harry Alan Towers, Jean Ray, Edgar Wallace and Sylvia Bourdon.
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A summary from its introduction
The tropes used in British gothic horror and in titles such as Bram Stoker's Dracula, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera continue to inspire contemporary fiction. As the cinema started to replace the novel as main source of fiction in the course of the 20th century, there have been a number of trends: starting in the 1920s there was German expressionism, from the sixties onwards there was Italian horror and British Hammer horror. The golden age of European horror was largely a thing of the past by the 1970s. When people stopped believing in god, they also stopped believing in the devil. So evil was no longer an external beast. Evil became a part of man himself. This explains the shift of popularity from the horror to the genres of thriller, psychological thriller and psychological horror since the 1950s.
Notes
Peter Van Weigen, author of Flemish Tales, upon which Mill of the Stone Women is based. I am unable to find a trace of this author.
See also
Editions
- St. Martin's Griffin edition, released September 1995: ISBN 031213519X
