(In our new column, Author Insights, Cinema Retro periodically invites authors of film-related books to provide our readers with the background story relating to their latest publication.)
BY JIM NEMETH
It
Came From … The Stories and Novels Behind Classic Horror, Fantasy and Science
Fiction Films (Midnight Marquee Press) came about when I and my co-author, Bob
Madison, started discussing the many movie classics that find their origins in
genre fiction. Both of us grew up loving science fiction, fantasy and horror
films. Like many genre movie buffs, we frequently sought out the books and
stories that influenced our favorite movies, often surprised (if not amazed) at
the differences. Though born in different states and a few, scant years apart,
our boyhoods were remarkably similar. Spending our youth on such Saturday night
television fare as Creature Features
and Thriller Theater, we made
imaginative quests into worlds very different from our own. Where I gravitated
toward supernatural fiction, Bob dug deeply into literary science fiction. Both
of us became devoted readers of genre fiction and then, later on, the history
of it. The love for movies, though, never wavered.
Over the years, when
considering cinema reference books, particularly those covering films within
the horror, science fiction and fantasy genres adapted from other mediums, we
found scant attention paid to the literary sources. It’s frustrating to pore
through a reference book and find little more concerning the inspiration behind
such films than the credit one finds in the film: “Based on the novel XXXXX, by so-and-so.â€
And so, It
Came From… was born.
The book consists of 21 essays covering
everything from Willie Wonka and the
Chocolate Factory to Planet of the
Apes to, of course, Psycho. In
the essays we shine a deserved spotlight on the authors and screenwriters,
detail the many challenges found in adaptation, and outline why some films do
it better than others. For clarity’s sake, we break the films into three categories—horror,
fantasy, science fiction—and then simply list them chronologically. Each
chapter is the sole work of one of the authors, with the ringer being special
chapters devoted to Dracula and the Frankenstein Monster, where we both delve
into not just one, but several of the best, worst, and most popular of their
cinematic incarnations.
The initial dream for this
volume was a comprehensive history that traced and compared films adapted from
other material back to its origins. But such was not to be! The number of
science fiction, fantasy and horror films that are adaptations from other media
are so varied and repetitive that the challenge was confining ourselves to just
a handful of favorite films. And even here, we deliberately excluded—with a
handful of exceptions—high-profile obvious choices such as The Shining and 2001: A Space
Odyssey, in favor of films that are underserved in genre criticism. But, as
should be obvious to any fan of cinema—sequels happen. Perhaps one day in the
future we will tackle our remaining favorites.
Meanwhile, we hope readers
will sit back, dim the lights a bit and enjoy. And just ignore those pesky
moans coming from under your bed and the scratching sounds you hear from inside
the walls…
BOO!
— Jim Nemeth (Member, Horror Writers
Association)
— Bob Madison (author of American Horror Writers (2000), and Dracula: The First Hundred Years (1997; ed.)
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