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Count Yorga, Vampire (1970)
Pressbook

Count Yorga, Vampire, helped bridge the Victorian-styled, mostly in the country vampire,  to the urban vampire, prowling city streets for his (or her) next victim. Holding this movie back from becoming a more impressive note in the history of cinema vampires is its bare bones budget and lack of style in direction. Robert Quarry is a standout in the role, but he’s given a pedestrian script that lacks nuance and vitality. That aside, it did spawn a sequel, so the box office was less lifeless than the movie.

Count Yorga Vampire Pressbook

My Short Stories:
Something in Martin’s Basement

It’s 3am in the darkened all-night Stardust Bijou theater. Time when the popcorn is well past soggy, the soda is quite flat, and the motionless people in the front row have stayed long past their bedtime. The projector starts, sounding like a lonely werewolf howling at the waning moon, and the images, flickering across the screen, start to come alive.

Something in Martin’s Basement

by J.M. Cozzoli

 

Friday 10:30am, July 8th, 1940

 Ancilla Scott was typing as fast as she could. I was dictating as slow as possible. We still were not meeting anywhere near the middle so the letter was taking a lot longer than I had planned. I sipped my coffee and thought of various ways I would like to take her pretty blond head and chop it off. Then again, maybe it would be more satisfying if I took the red scarf she wore around her pale neck and strangled her with it. No. Too much effort and I liked her as a person, just not as my secretary; and trying to get her corpse down the Chrysler Building’s elevators would be a nightmare. I had enough of those to deal with already: nightmares, not corpses.

“Why don’t we take a break?” I recommended. She sighed with relief.

“I’ll file these, then,” she smiled in that soft, raspy, voice of hers that made me think she was a heavy smoker, but I never saw her light up. She grabbed the folders on her desk, got up with determination, and then walked over to the filing cabinet. I usually refiled the folders after she left for the day, otherwise I would never find anything. As she opened the top drawer I imagined I could just push her head in and slam the drawer shut real hard a few times. I shrugged and retreated from the outer office to my own desk. I read in the pulps that private investigators sat at their desks with their feet propped up, waiting for clients. At least I could do that. I could also watch Ancilla through the tinted glass, in the outer office, at her desk, imagining she was a real secretary.

The sound of the door from the hallway opening was followed by Ancilla saying hello. She walked Captain Raphael Ligotti of the NYPD into my office. …

The Incredible Melting Man
Exhibitor’s Teaser

Courtesy of It Came From Hollywood is this advance sales kicker for Rick Baker’s work in The Incredible Melting Man. With apparent influence from The Quatermass Xperiment, 1955, The Incredible Melting Man did well at the box office but was panned by critics. Rick Baker, the special makeup effects wizard whose creations appear in many notable horror and sci fi movies (Men in Black, Star Wars, It’s Alive, An American Werewolf in London, etc.), had designed the melting effect to be gradual, with four distinct phases of makeup.

It wasn’t until Baker was well into his work for The Incredible Melting Man that he heard from the Star Wars accountant who informed Baker that they wanted him to make the aliens for the cantina sequence. Baker explained that he was now totally involved in The Incredible Melting Man, but they persisted in their desire for Baker’s talent and asked if he couldn’t work something out. Baker would assemble and set up a crew to do the work with Baker supervising. The team Baker formed consisted of Doug Beswick, Jon Berg, Laine Liska, Rob Bottim [sic], and Phil Tippett, nearly all of whom are stop-motion animators…

…Baker’s work on The Incredible Melting Man consisted of four major latex full-head masks. Each one was altered slightly so that there were perhaps ten different versions of the makeup (Making a Monster, Al Taylor and Sue Roy, 1980, Crown Publishers).

From Paul: “This sumptuous heavy card stock teaser was sent out to exhibitors in the Summer of 1977 in advance of the picture’s Christmas release. I acquired this rare little gem in the Summer of 1985, and the story of how I knabbed it is worth sharing here.

During my youth as a wayward teen, smoking cigarettes and combing my hair to look cool, I used to do other “cool” stuff like rummage through garbage dumpsters behind local movie theaters. The Marquette Theater, one of three local neighborhood theaters in the Marquette Park area on the South Side of Chicago, had closed the year before. During the Summer of 1985, a crew cleaned the place out. Dumping boxes of god knows what into several dumpsters behind the theater. There were boxes of paperwork (which I should have also grabbed) and many other pressbooks and advertising material (which I also should have grabbed but didn’t), but within this pile of “garbage” was this little gem. It caught my eye above everything else because it was something I had never seen before. The cover was beaten to all hell, but the rest looked as mint as it does in these scans. I’ve held onto this since then because the excitement of finding it in a dumpster behind a defunct movie theater was one of the highlights of my life as a collector. Since discovering it in 1985, I’ve never run across another.

The Marquette Theater, to my knowledge based on research, never booked Melting ManStar Wars played The Marquette for what seemed like forever, so I suppose the management wasn’t keen on kicking the golden goose to the curb to let an astronaut melt on the big screen. This item remains one of my most prized additions to my collection, mostly because it has a story attached to it, and pulling this nugget out to do a fresh, high-quality scan brought back all those memories of being a teen who loved movie marketing and memorabilia but rarely had the bread to buy anything.

 

The Incredible Melting Man teaser promo The Incredible Melting Man teaser promo The Incredible Melting Man teaser promo The Incredible Melting Man teaser promo

The Coward’s Corner of Homicidal

Professor Kinema was kind enough to share this shameful theater giveaway for Homicidal. Another brilliant gimmick to get into that theater seat, the Coward’s Corner made sure you didn’t sneak out during the more lurid moments of the movie. Of course, this is a William Castle movie, so while fun and scary, definitely not like sitting through Hostel, for sure. Here’s how it worked. A ‘fright-break’ would be given near the climax to give the more scared among the audience a chance to hoof it to the lobby, where they’d have to wait in a cardboard booth with a fake nurse. Of course, Castle made sure to really lay it on with a yellow light to follow the individual, as they followed yellow footsteps on the floor to the booth. All this while a pre-recorded message added “Watch the chicken!” Of course, the audience ate it all up. Not so much the person doing the walk of shame, though. There was a refund if anyone dared do it, but that rarely happened. Genius. Pure genius. At today’s ticket prices, I’m sure doing something like this would lose money pretty quick, though. Shame or savings? Hell, I’d go with savings.

 

Yor the Hunter From the Future
(1983) Pressbook

A French, Turkish, and Italian (oh my!) movie from 1983, Yor, the Hunter From the Future has dinosaurs, flying saucers, scantily clad men and women, robots, a giant bat, and Reb Brown. He played Captain America in a 1979 made for tv movie where he wore more clothes. Yor won three Golden Raspberry Awards in 1984. I’m not sure if director Antonio Margheriti was sober when working but you shouldn’t be if you want to watch this one. The pressbook is pretty cool, though, with a coloring contest, maze contest, and fun riffs on the Yor place or mine and Axe me, I’m Yor’s variety.

yor the hunter from the future pressbook

The Comics Code
20 Years of Self-Strangulation?

Here’s an interesting read for you older comic book geeks (like me) who remember the days of the comics’ code and its impact on both the comic and magazine racks. This article is taken from Inside Comics, issues 3 and 4, 1974. For you newbies, the Comics Code Authority (CCA) was formed in 1954 as a voluntary alternative to government regulation of the content in comics. It followed after a “moral panic” arose over the graphic violence, sexuality, gruesome horrors, and the supposed effect on juvenile delinquency, that comics packed in every issue.  Said panic was promoted by one Fredrik Wertham, a psychiatrist, who wrote a book called Seduction of the Innocent. While he came to be reviled by comic book fans, it should be said that he was a progressive shrink who treated poor black patients at his Lafargue Clinic (from Wikipedia), and “his institutional stressor findings were cited when courts overturned multiple segregation statutes, most notably in Brown v. Board of Education.” So he wasn’t all that bad, just misguided about comics.

EC Comics (which is now legendary for the horror titles it put out during the 1950s), and William Gaines, its publisher, took the ire of the senate judiciary subcommittee’s hearing to investigate juvenile delinquency after Wertham provided his light-the-bonfire testimony. As noted on CBLDF.org:

As for Gaines himself, the hearings changed his course forever: Gaines’ deep resentment of Wertham’s assertions and the impact of the Senate hearings colored his attitudes towards publishing. To escape the regulation of the Comics Code (and the dwindling comics sales he saw after the code was enacted), Gaines founded Mad magazine, encouraging cartoonists to lampoon authority. The magazine became a powerful influence on cartoonists and activists in the years to come.

Ironically, while the comics code “tidied-up” comic books, as one newspaper article of the time wrote, it forgot about the magazine rack. Magazines were not covered by the code. The horror, adult themes and images, and, frankly, the more entertaining aspects of storytelling moved over to the larger size format and into titles that included Creepy, Eerie, various Marvel horror and superhero titles, Skywald “horror mood” titles, and, continuing the irony, a reprinting of many of the 1940s and 1950s horror stories that spurred the comics’ code into existence in the first place (albeit in chilling black and white instead of color).

By 2001 Marvel dropped adherence to the comics code as it lost its relevance in the real world that it forced comics to hide from. But even before that, in 1971, Marvel ignored the somewhat confusing comics code rules with issue 96 of The Amazing Spider-Man, which contained a story about drug addiction. For the first time the code’s seal of approval did not appear on that issue. I can’t tell you how thrilling that was for me, and many comics fans of the day, to finally see that. We buzzed about it in the neighborhood for weeks.

Stan Lee made the decision to run with the issue without the code after the Nixon Whitehouse asked Marvel to do an anti-drug story. Lee went to the code people for approval and was turned down.  Go to CBR.com for more information.

The Comics Code from Inside Comics Magazine The Comics Code from Inside Comics Magazine The Comics Code from Inside Comics Magazine The Comics Code from Inside Comics Magazine The Comics Code from Inside Comics Magazine The Comics Code from Inside Comics Magazine

The Sign of Zorro (1960) Pressbook

A big thanks to It Came From Hollywood who have now joined the Gang of Terror from Zombos’ Closet. With a huge archive of both Joe Kane’s (The Phantom of the Movies) movie memorabilia and their own, stretching across decades, you will be seeing a lot of cool stuff in its new home From Zombos’ Closet. Of course, we’ll need a bigger closet…but, to start, here’s The Sign of Zorror pressbook from It Came From Hollywood’s archive. Being a Disney pressbook, it is filled with merchandizing and promotional content galore. Guy Williams (Armando Joseph Catalano) also made a very dashing Zorror, too. His two notable roles were as Zorror and John Robinson (Lost in Space)Click each image to expand it–you will need a BIG screen–or right-click the expanded image to download it.) And you don’t have to read the signs to find more pressbooks, just rummage through our categories.

The Sign of Zorro 1960 Pressbook page

Citizen Kane (1941) Pressbook

Here is the rare premier release of the Citizen Kane pressbook. There were two pressbooks created for the movie and this is the one that appeared first. After the movie did poorly–what with William Randolph Hearst’s minions bad-mouthing it as much as possible and killing adverts for it–a second pressbook was created with a different slant for advertising as the movie progressed through theaters. Through it all, Citizen Kane is THE movie that should be on your bucket list of must see cinema, no matter what kind of movie fan you are. Orson Welles visionary style, the fluid and timeless social commentary, and the emotional gut-wrenching by the soul-twisting characters, scripted between him and  Herman J. Mankiewicz, are classic all the way. Read online or download these images: Citizen Kane Pressbook

Citizen Kane Pressbook Cover

The Watcher in the Woods (1980) Pressbook

One of Disney’s more troubled productions, The Watcher in the Woods hit theaters, was pulled from theaters, was re-edited, reshot, and re-written, and has multiple endings galore; although the 1981 version of the film’s re-release is the official ending. Yet, with Bette Davis, David McCallum, a creepy suspense permeated with a supernatural mood that gives way to science fantasy, it is one of Disney’s more compelling entries and ranks as a good horror movie (at least by this critic). One funny note: Bette Davis, who was pushing past 70 at the time, insisted on playing her younger self instead of another actor. After a lot of makeup and work to make her look younger, the director and Davis watched some test footage. The director told her it wasn’t working. Davis’s response: “You’re goddamn right.” For more Bette Davis-ness, see Dick Cavet’s interviews with her.

Download pressbook images: The Watcher in the Woods Pressbook or click the images to enlarge (but use a BIG screen).

The Black Cauldron (1985) Pressbook

The most expensive animated film at the time, The Black Cauldron falls into Disney’s darker storytelling side for children and adults. After some scenes proved too intense for kids  during a test screening, some removals and additions to soften the animated terrors were made, pushing the film to release a year later than scheduled. The Black Cauldron was the first Disney film to use computer-based animation. The Watcher in the Woods (1980) and Dragonslayer (1981), two live-action Disney films,  also pushed toward the darker sides of fantasy, with both achieving cult status.

Download pressbook images: The Black Cauldron Pressbook

My Short Stories: Tommy Boy

Shadow mastersHere’s my short story, Tommy Boy, which first appeared in Shadow Masters: An Anthology from the Horror Zine, edited by Jeani Rector.

Tommy Boy
by JM Cozzoli

With great effort, Frank hoisted himself off the treehouse floor and up to the glassless window. The sun would be up soon so he had to be ready this time. He had only one chance left and the steady leak of blood from the deep, jagged, rip along his right leg was making him woozy. Duct tape could only go so far.

He knew this time he couldn’t miss and with more light he wouldn’t. He was sure of that.

The pain made him vomit. Again. He wiped his lips as best he could with whatever clean space he could still find on his sleeve, and steadied himself by grabbing the windowsill tight, although the growing numbness in his hands made that difficult. He leaned over the sill, biting his lower lip hard, making it bleed as he concentrated all his remaining strength on getting a long, good look. The cool morning air fanning across the sweat on his face helped clear the nausea growing in his stomach. But only a little. …