Here's one of Brad Steiger's very first books, a quickie volume riding the monster kid mania of the '60s! Brad gives a little biographical info in his foreword, and we see the seeds of the writer who would become lord of a paranormal empire just a few years later. He promises to treat Dracula, Gillman, and the rest with the respect they're due as "popular mythology" ... but he's not without a sense of humor, either, and Merit Books packaged the whole thing with a very cheeky style.
Steiger credits some of the photos featured to Mr. Rich Jones of Columbus, Ohio and Mr. and Mrs. H. Brenner of Bruco Enterprises, New York. Kind of wild to think about back in the day, when you couldn't just go online and search for this kind of stuff, or rewatch the films on demand via VHS/DVD/Bluray/rickety unreliable streaming service of your choice.
Steiger does a good job covering horror icons such as Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu, and I gotta admit he's thorough in his selection of titles ... mostly.
Oddly, Steiger doesn't cover any of the Japanese sci-fi fantasy films which were storming America's shores at the time. No Godzilla, no Mothra, not even Rodan! Maybe this isn't so odd, as there was a certain cultural chauvinism at work in vintage monster movie writing which often relegated Japanese films to the garbage can. Or Steiger's omissions might be part of a different broader pattern, because he doesn't even cover Ray Harryhausen at all, either! Willis O'Brien gets his due, but we're mostly dealing with actors in makeup and man-sized horrors like Gill-man here.
Maybe his bias is against giant creatures, or daikaiju - after all, couldn't Gill-man technically be a sentai monster? Would Brad have included some Kamen Rider creatures if he'd written this a decade later? Sure, King Kong is a giant monster, but everyone had to write about Kong back in the day - he's the Eighth Wonder of the World! Same goes for O'Brien's The Lost World with its stop motion dinosaurs. But after that, Steiger settles down into Dracula/Wolfman territory for the most part.
As promised, we end with some pics from Dr. Who. Some of them are just headshots of characters and none have any specific captions - ol' Brad was figuring out his fast and dirty formula already, it seems. Merit Books features ads for two other Steiger titles in the back, including his very first Fortean volume Ghosts, Ghouls, and Other Peculiar People. There's an obvious crossover appeal to his movie monster writing and the maybe-fiction "true spooky stories" he would shift to in the coming years.
Despite all my carping, this specific title would play its role to a tee as far as keeping any monster kid occupied for a few hours of oohing and awing at B/W photos and Steiger's descriptions.
Merit Books, 1965
