December is Trash Cinema Month at the PorPor Books Blog
In June of 1980, Bill Landis (1959 - 2008), a 21 year-old New Yorker who had an affection for the louche life, handed out the very first issue of his zine, Sleazoid Express.
The xeroxed, one-page, typewritten sheet covered such films as Mad Max, Humanoids from the Deep, and Let Me Die A Woman. Within a few months Sleazoid had attracted a following among both trash film fans, and the more sophisticated set who referred to movies as 'cinema,' and called themselves 'cineastes.'
Landis's combination of shoe-leather film criticism, and 42nd Street anthropology, gave the zine a sensibility that was unique.
Across the USA, and eventually in other Anglophone countries, fans of trash cinema began producing their own xeroxed zines, such as Gore Gazette, Psychotronic Video, Cinema Sewer, GICK !, etc., distributing these at theaters, book and record stores, hipster gatherings, and, for some zines, even newsstands - !
The creators, editors, and contributors to these zines were Baby Boomers who grew up on the old monster films airing on TV shows hosted by Zacherly and other horror movie emcees. Baby Boomers who as kids, eagerly grabbed issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland and Castle of Frankenstein, and assembled the monster model kits issued by Aurora.
As adults, these horror fans set out to produce zines on topics near and dear to them, and found receptive audiences. This zine culture helped spur the Midnight Movie and Cult Cinema movements. The advent of VHS tapes in the 1980s, and DVDs in the 1990s and 2000s, further enhanced the value of zines as guides to the best of all the material popping up on the shelves of Blockbuster, and the myriad smaller, independent video dealers (like Mike Vraney's 'Something Weird').
While I wasn't a hardcore horror zine reader and collector (I never subscribed to Fangoria), every now and then, when I was in Atomic Books in Baltimore, I'd pick up one or two zines. So the zine phenomenon stayed on my radar until the later 2000s, when print zines began to transition to websites.
'Xerox Ferox: The Wild World of the Horror Film Fanzine,' published in 2013, is a tribute to the horror and trash film zines (and professional magazines, like Fangoria), that flourished in the 1980s and 1990s.
One thing to mention: don't get this from your 'usual' online book retailer ! It's over-priced. You can order an eBook, a trade paperback, or a hardcover edition of the book directly from the Headpress website. The trade paperback edition cost me £24.48 (including shipping) which is just short of $33 US. The book itself is printed in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, as a print-on-demand title, so it's shipped from there directly to your address.
This book is a little bit bigger in size than a mass-market paperback, and at 800 pages, it's a ‘thicc’ little package.
The book compiles 47 interviews with the writers and publishers of trash cinema zines (along with a trio of low-low budget filmmakers profiled in the 'Lost Zine' section of the book).
Among those represented are Jimmy McDonough, Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford, Chas Balun, ‘Bhob’ (i.e., Robert Stewart), Jim Morton, Steve Puchalski, and Nick Cato.
Crammed in among the tiny-font text are black & white, low-res scans of media from the zine era, and photos of the creators of the profiled zines.
There are hours of reading to be had from this book. It’s fun dipping into, here and there, for morsels and revelations of pop culture knowledge and nostalgia. For example:
● Bob Martin, the editor of ‘Fangoria’ magazine, once took a writing workshop put on by Henry Beard, a founder and editor of the National Lampoon, and Tony Hiss, son of the accused Cold War spy Alger Hiss ?!
● Kris Gilpin’s interview features an anecdote, about a Times Square video smut booth, that simultaneously is hysterically funny, and utterly repellent.
● David Nolte, an Australian who created that continent's first horror film zine, Crimson Celluloid, maintained pen-pal status with notorious serial killers such as Douglas Daniel Clark, John Wayne Gacy, Otis Toole, William Bonin, and Arthur Shawcross, among others !!!
● Dennis Daniel is yet another Baby Boomer who, as a child, had his life irrevocably warped by exposure to Jay Robert Nash's iconic 'Bloodletters and Badmen.'
● When Tim Lucas (Video Watchdog) was 14 or 15 years old (circa 1970 or 1971) he published his first zine, a mimeographed zine titled Apples Woofer. A contributor to that zine was a science fiction writer Lucas had befriended at MidwestCon: Andrew J. Offutt !
Here's Offutt's son, Chris, on attending an early 70s Midwestcon science fiction convention:
That summer our family attended MidwestCon, which turned out to be my last con. The minute we arrived at the hotel, Dad began operating in full John Cleve mode, refusing to acknowledge his children. The only other teenager at the con was the fourteen-year-old daughter of a minor SF writer who also wrote porn. We talked the first night. Tessa had run away to New Orleans for a while but now lived with her father, whom she hated. He ignored her, and he drank and had too many rules. I told her I knew exactly what she meant. We agreed on everything—fans were the biggest weirdos in the world, cons were boring, and our parents didn’t care.
....At the elevator, I heard the sound of an
opening door. Down the hall, my father stepped from a room. He said
something low, and a woman responded with laughter. Dad closed the door
behind him and straightened his hair. I pushed the elevator button
repeatedly, fearful that Dad would see us. Tessa and I descended to the
lobby without talking. Dazed and happy, I wanted to remain in her
company, but she avoided me for the rest of the con.....
Interestingly, in his interviews, which were conducted in 2010 - 2012, editor Szpunar asks his subjects about the state of the zine culture. Most interviewees respond that zines have been replaced by online portals. Back 11-12 years ago, that may have looked like the forward path. However, what we since have seen is the rise of the print-on-demand (POD) 'bookzine,' media pioneered by Justin Marriott and his Paperback Fanatic franchise (the first issue of which was published in 2007). Indeed, you now can go online and find a number of POD publications devoted to trash films.
Summing things up, who will want to read 'Xerox Ferox ? Certainly, Baby Boomers with a nostalgia for the horror and trash cinema genres of the 1970s and 1980s, and the VHS era, will find much here to enjoy. But modern-day trash cinema and zine fans also will find content in 'Xerox' that will inform their own endeavors in film and self-publishing, as the authors profiled in the book all have messages of perseverance and dedication: if you really love what you are doing, then in the end, it's all worthwhile.
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