The Collector - 'Profits of Doom' Photostrip story

As you can see above this is not your usual photostrip story, usually these type of stories were in copies of teenage girls magazines and were nearly always about love and relationships, you know all very soppy stuff. So seeing a horror themed photostrip story was wonderful and a refreshing change, not that I read any of these teenage girls mags, honest! but I am sure that many of you will be familar to their concept. The above photo story appeared in a 1982 edition of 'Eagle' comic, one of the best boys comics around at the time. I have another 2 or 3 of these 'The Collector' photostrip stories if you would like to see somemore. I think they work really well and they are a nice edition to the comicstrip style of story telling. I like the use of drawings in this strip, a great way to show special effects in a style that would of been too costly for something like this. I bet these were great fun to be involved with, especially the expressions they had to do for them.

'HORROR MOVIES' & 'MONSTERS AND VAMPIRES' - Alan Frank

Here we have 2 wonderful horror film books by Alan Frank, the first one 'HORROR MOVIES - Tales of terror in the cinema' (1974), the second 'MONSTERS AND VAMPIRES - Spinechilling creatures of the cinema' (1976), and both published by Octopus books. Both books come with book jackets, 'Horror Movies' front cover has a scene from 'Dr.Terror's House of Horror' and the back is Christopher Lee from 'The Satanic rites of Dracula'. The 'Monsters and Vampires' front cover shows Christopher Lee as dracula and the back is from 'Frankenstein and the monster from hell'. The book themselves both have a black and white image from a film on the front and repeated on the back [see above]. Both books were later reprinted in softcover and had different cover photos.

These 2 horror film books are wonderfully written and informative as well as both illustrated with fantastic stills in colour and black and white. They are certainly up there with Denis Gifford's 'Pictorial history of horror films' has books that are a joy to read and browse through.

The 'Horror Movies' book chapters are as follows:

Introduction

The Baron

The Count

Back from the dead

Metamorphoses and Masquerades

Meet the Ladies!

Madmen, Demented Doctors and Psychopath Scientists

All creatures great and small

Then there is Acknowlegments, Index of film titles, and General index.

The 'Monsters and Vampires' chapters are as follows:

Introduction

The First Vampires

Dracula is born: Bela Lugosi

The Prince of Darkness: Christopher Lee

A Variety of Vampires

How to make a Monster

The Beauty and the Beast

Monstrous Changes

Terror from another world

And index. The chapter titles speak for themselves.

'Mini HORROR SCRAPERBOARDS'

I am not sure when these mini horror scraperboards came out, but they are most likely from the 70's or early 80's at a guess. This originally was a 15 card pack of which only 6 were pictures, the other cards were blank scraperboards that you created your own pictures on. As you can see above is the cover and 4 of the pictures, not sure what the other 2 were. Here we have King Kong, Frankenstein's Monster, Werewolf, and Dracula. Anyone that is familiar with scraperboards will know that the idea was that you scraped off the lines of the picture to reveal the white underneath, as well as making the picture more clear and stand out more, it also was quite skillful in that you needed a good eye and steady hand to scratch off the details of the pictures. The cards above were already done by someone else, but as you can see you can get a good effect by just highlighting some of the picture. These cards measure 4 inches by 2 1/2 inches approx. I have seen a horror scraperboard not so long ago that features Frankenstein's Monster, Dracula, Wolfman etc on a 8 by 10 inch picture and when the outline is scraped away it glows in the dark.