Customer Reviews

Hollywood's Classic Scream Queens : 1930s

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According to modern(feminist) film theory, the history of Women in the Horror film begins somewhere in the seventies presumably with HALLOWEEN. Books such as Haskell's FROM REVERENCE TO RAPE and Clover's MEN, WOMEN AND CHAINSAWS desparately and contemptuously dismiss anything that happened before the rise of modern feminism. Hence the significant efforts of scores of women in horror are willfully neglected lest people were to discover that "sisters" were doing it for themselves without Freidan or Steinem to "save" them. Thus it has fallen to "mere" nonacademics like Greg Mank and The Svehlas of Midnight Marquee Press to celebrate the great accomplishments of women in horror BF. (Before Feminism). CLASSIC SCREAM QUEENS does so simply and elegantly by letting pictures speak a thousand words. All the notable women of horror in the Thirties are represented in simply gorgeously mounted b & W film stills and publicity shots. The writer has never seen the pics look as fine as they do here. Plus there are many MANY shots that will be new to the horror fan. Zita Johann, Helen Chandler, Frances Drake, Valerie Hobson, Gloria Holden, Elsa Lanchester, Myrna Loy, Fay Wray and many more are covered, creating a fabulous history of women in horror in the 1930s. With little text and many photos, CLASSIC SCREAM QUEENS does more for Women in Horror than all the verbiage of the average "academic" text. An important accomplishment. Recommended for all libraries.

To be precise about what we have here, it is a large-format paperback full of well-reproduced photos, both studio portraits and film stills, featuring the females who had the thankless jobs of screaming and looking terrified in the classic horror films of the 1930s. Apart from Fay Wray, most people would have trouble naming any of these lovely ladies, which is a shame. And some of the entries are a trifle surprising (Myrna Loy?!?). Each beauty gets a brief biography, usually a couple of paragraphs, and then on to the stills. Everyone will have his or her favorite among the girls here. Mine is Francis Drake, an incredible but unusual-looking beauty who drives Peter Lorre plausibly wild in MAD LOVE, and drives Boris Karloff plausibly homicidal in INVISIBLE RAY. The book is also fine for generating enthusiasm to view films you might not yet have seen. For instance in which film does Karloff portray (very well indeed) two identical twins, one good and one evil, and what actress portrays the impossibly lovely Thea, around whom the plot turns? Recommended, but don't expect much in the way of text.