Please Note: this DVD set has been surpassed by a newer Blu-Ray project, and is not usually duplicated. Please see the release below, which has the same or better content, in higher quality, with additional material.
DVD cover artwork - 14mm spine (click to enlarge)
This is a project I've been wanting to do for some years. I remember it fondly when it was shown on UK BBC2 in 1997, two years after BBC2's excellent 27th May to 2nd June 1995 Forbidden Weekend of censorship & horror related films & documentaries.
It was a documentary series written and hosted by Clive Barker, exploring the history of horror, from the cinema to art. A tie-in book was also released featuring art work by Clive along with film reviews by Stephen Jones. While there are twenty-six chapters in the book, the six-part series had just twenty-one segments, two of which were different to those in the book. Each of the segments (with the exception of that dealing with The Crow (N for Never Again in the TV series but included within Z for Zombie in the book) was introduced by Clive and he also narrated a number of the segments. You can see how each letter was titled & introduced from the list below.
There was a huge range of source material covered, but the big-hitter movie segments most people will be interested in are as follows; Episode one covers
Psycho,
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, &
Silence Of The Lambs. Two features
The Exorcist. Three
Night Of The Living Dead. Four
Halloween, and five features Tom Savini's special effects.
A for American Psycho:"In the winter of 1957, police on the trail of a missing woman were led to a Wisconsin farmhouse. What they found there stunned the local community. As the facts of the case seeped into the American consciousness, they became the stuff of myth. Three classic horror movies over three decades drew on the atrocities in that small town to reflect the nightmares of their own age, and each movie went a little deeper into the death, the ritual and the insanity."
B for Beelzebub:"When the film The Exorcist was released in 1973 the Devil had been dormant for some while. He'd been reduced to a figure of fun; comic relief in kids cartoons. What writer William Peter Blatty and director William Friedkin understood so well is that the dark gods still exist - expressions of our deepest fears and desires."
C for Chaos:"In the 1930s, the Old Gods had their golden age, courtesy of one Howard Philip Lovecraft. His works - clotted, paranoid narratives about the clash between man and the supernatural - are dense and difficult but, for anyone interested in horror, completely indispensable."
D for Devil Rides Out:"Classic British horror has an unwritten rule - aristocrats should suffer mightily against the forces of darkness, but it is always the servants who should mop up the blood. No British author understood this better than Dennis Wheatley, servant of the Queen and sworn enemy of the Devil."
E for Escape:"Everybody wants a safe place to live, a street where the children can play unmolested and where the street lamps are reassuringly bright. In other words, the suburbs. And they were a safe place until the day John Carpenter moved in..."
F for Final Frame:"All of us yearn for immortality, for ourselves or a loved one. But, as the sages say, be careful what you wish for - it might come true..."
G for Grim Tales:"Pick up a book of classic fairy tales now and you might be surprised. Did we really grow up on such an unrelieved diet of infanticide, cannibalism and bestiality? We develop our taste for the Dark Side very early in life and some of us, if we're lucky, never lose it."
H: (Unbroadcast)
I for Innocents:"Ever since Cain and Abel, kids have been getting worse. At least, that's what some adults who forget they were ever kids themselves will tell you. Did you really bring up your angels to behave like little devils? And, if you didn't, what exactly is driving them?"
J for Japan:"Since the war, Japan has put its faith in technology, but sometimes technology takes on a life of its own. Tokyo filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto makes movies about men turning into machines. The hero and his tetsuo, or 'iron man', is part warrior insect and part driller killer."
K for Killing Joke:"At its best, theatrical horror can be overwhelmingly intense - think of Greek tragedy or Shakespeare. But for sheer, well, spectacle you can't beat the French Grand Guignol. Grand Guignol is a term which has entered our language to describe the most gruesome events. But was there anything quite so harrowing as the events enacted on a small stage in Paris almost 100 years ago?"
L: (Unbroadcast)
M for Mistress Of The Night:"The British born actress Barbara Steele has a face, a look, unlike anyone else in movies. Most of her Italian-made horror films, like Mario Bava's Black Sunday, are modern day cults. She does what few actresses are capable of doing - she lets you see both destruction and delight in the same pair of eyes."
N for Never Again: No Introduction.
O for Open Vein:"Horror delights in forbidden pleasures. Things which are terrifying, yet strangely compelling. Of all the dreadful pleasures, none is quite so arousing as blood. Its colour, its smell, its texture arouse a primal response in us. It's either a distressing sign of wounding or a proof of our victory."
P for Pain:"Among special effects artists, Tom Savini holds a unique place. He's affectionately known as the Wizard of Gore, the man who put splatter on the map. In films like Dawn Of The Dead and Friday the 13th he makes us believe that the carnage is for real. And he should know, he's seen it with his own eyes."
Q for Quiet Men:"Some of my best friends are monsters. I've often found that the actors who on screen are the most hideous of creatures are, in reality, the most pleasant of folk, although if you get on the wrong side of them they can sometimes take a turn for the worse..."
R for Rictus:"One of the most unendurable experiences we can have goes like this: we look into a human face and see madness there. Insanity is the most pure, the most undiluted horror of all. Look very closely at the faces you are about to see. Aren't they strangely familiar? Couldn't they almost be you..?"
S for Sorceress:"The American writer Shirley Jackson is perhaps best known for her novel The Haunting Of Hill House. An elegantly written exploration of the place where aberrant minds and supernatural phenomena meet. She's described now as the pioneer of what's being termed 'modern gothic' but that barely evokes the power of her imaginative vision."
T: (Unbroadcast)
U for Unborn:"Everybody knows that, when we're born, a ruthless system of biological machinery takes over. Sex or birth, they either function to plan, which is awesome, or they go wrong, which is the stuff of nightmares..."
V: (Unbroadcast)
W for Window:"When Edgar Allan Poe died of drink and despair in Baltimore in 1849, all that remained of him was an old coat, some unpaid bills and some of the most feverish, compelling and horrific literature in the English language. His work has inspired movies, poetry, theatre, painting and the photographer Simon Marsden."
X for Xploitation:"Horror has always delighted in its maverick status. The term 'low budget' might have been invented for the horror movie. And the same fevered imaginations that dream up these celluloid fantasies can be equally creative at getting them seen."
Y: (Unbroadcast)
Z for Zombies:"Face to face with a monster, I like to think I could handle myself pretty well: charm a vampire, sidestep a werewolf, but of all the horror archetypes, zombies have always scared me witless! Maybe it's because they're so unthinking, so unemotional. Maybe it's simply because there's so damn many of them..."
I recorded the whole series on VHS at the time, but didn't keep the recording for too long, and regretted it. It's never been released at any time on VHS or DVD either. Around 2005, I found a US bootleg DVD website selling copies of the complete series and I bought a copy. The quality wasn't great with the 4h 59m 49s of NTSC VHS source footage compressed in to 4.8GB over two discs (Disc 1 was 2h 15m 38s @ 2.2GB and Disc 2 was 2h 44m 11s @ 2.6GB).
The front cover for the Clive Barker's A-Z Of Horror tie-in book
If that wasn't enough, the source footage itself looked 3rd generation, and the credits were truncated in places. The set did however have around 40mins of the Exorcist documentary 'The Fear of God: 25 Years from The Exorcist' which played after Episode 2, although it abruptly ends mid-way though (presumably at the end of the source VHS tape).
Some years later on the 18th of July 2012, I got in touch with an US IMDB forum posted who mentioned having a copy of the series. I set up a trade, and received a copy from him on the 29th of August 2012. The quality of this set was far better. Not only did it look like it was taken from first generation source footage with every episode playing complete from start to finish including credits, with the 4h 19m 14s of PAL source footage compressed in to 17.5GB, split across six single layer DVD-Rs. It was only after getting it, that I realized that this set was transferred by OriginalTrilogy.com UK user Meedermow (small world!).
After getting Meedermow's okay to re-package his set with proper artwork, I designed a DVD cover and disc art. As with my previous project; The Mary Whitehouse Experience Box-Set, I also added in BBC2 idents to play before each episode to add to the nostalgia factor, along with two next-week's-upcoming-episode promo trailers which had been recorded at the time and included on Meedermow's DVDs too.
In May 2022, I spent a few days creating two 30 second mock-up BBC2 90s style trailers to play before the main menu on the first disc of my 2022
Dawn Of The Dead Blu-Ray. Some of my movie projects are fairly mainstream (such as
Dawn Of The Dead,
The Evil Dead, and
Zombie Flesh Eaters) and most people who like the horror genre will already at least know of the titles. Others are horribly niche & obscure and would only be of interest to a small pool of people no matter how much I promoted them (such as the
Evil Dead Shorts & Trailers Blu-Ray). I think there are some projects in the middle such as TV preservations; shown once 25 years ago, never repeated, and officially unreleased on any home format. There's no one officially promoting them today, and you'd really have to be searching for them, to find them, which is a shame.
These two related trailers cover some great memories, and I hope they get more people interested. They're both 18+ on YouTube, so you might have to click & log-in to view them.
It would be hard to improve on this set given the really decent quality of Meedermow's transfers, and that any possible VHS source materal would be over 15 years old by now. That said, if anyone reading this has anything they think would be a decent extra to add to this set, such as late-90s BBC2 promos for horror films or cult shows, one-off documentaries, or other such material then please get in touch.
If you're interested in any of my fanmade projects, you can contact me via email at
, or through the
Rob's Nostalgia Projects Facebook page. Check out & 'like' that Facebook page to see the latest in-progress updates to any current projects, and check out my
Wants List to see if you can assist me with any future projects or upgrades.
