I’m not only a proud contributor for TG Daily, but I’ve also written several genre books.
My third book, Reel Terror, has just come out through St Martins Press, you can order it here, and it is indeed my love letter to the genre. Of course, it was also enormous fun to write it.
If you’re a horror fan, within the pages of Reel Terror you’ll find behind the scenes stories of the Universal classics (Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf-Man), Psycho, Night of the Living Dead, Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, Jaws, The Omen, Halloween, Dawn of the Dead, The Shining, Friday the 13th, The Thing, Nightmare on Elm Street, Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, Scream, and many, many more.
For Reel Terror, I conducted over 120 interviews with the people who created the great horror films in cinema history, as well as many people who worked behind the scenes.
Interviewees include George A. Romero, Wes Craven, John Carpenter, make-up masters Rick Baker, Tom Savini and Dick Smith, Exorcist author William Peter Blatty, among many others.
Having written about metal with Bang Your Head, there’s definite similarities between the music and horror. The fan bases are very similar, especially with their loyalty to the bands and the movies. In fact, Reel Terror is dedicated to the fans, who have kept the genre alive all these years, and there is probably no genre more fan driven than horror. It’s a shared experience when a horror movie audience all screams together, adding a whole new dimension to the fear that’s unfolding on the screen.
There have been a number of books about great eras in Hollywood, but what are these books usually missing? Horror films, of course. The genre’s always had the stigma of being B movie, drive-in fodder, but it takes a great deal of skill and ability to make a horror film. If Reel Terror can help bring more respect to the genre, then I did my job.
