Many, many years ago, before the days of home video, long before DVDs and Blurays had been invented, in a time when video streaming would have seemed like witchcraft, young genre fans like my brother and I needed to find other ways of getting our regular fix of monsters and gore. Here in the UK, magazines like STARBURST, FANGORIA, and STARLOG could only be found intermittently and on certain newsagent’s shelves, but the one place that never let us down was the bookstore.
As soon as we made it into Woolworths or WH Smiths, we’d find a way of separating from our parents (or whichever responsible adult had foolishly given us a lift into Birmingham), then scurry away to the horror section in search of blood-drenched book covers. The gooey pictures on the cover of THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN paperback, as I recall, gave me nightmares for a week. Pete and I would stand there for ages and read and re-read the gory parts of novels – the exploding head scene at the beginning of SCANNERS was a particular favourite – but the holy grail was undoubtably the photo novel.
Those precious, full colour, hard to find books filled with glorious pictures and minimal text were the closest us kids could get to watching the gruesome films we talked about with our friends in the playground. To publish a book with photographs of literally every scene of a film while said movie was still in cinemas seems like such a bizarre concept today, but these books were a precious lifeline in my formative years.
Why am I posting about this? Two reasons. First, to acknowledge that these books could also be incredibly misleading. I recently watched a fairly obscure 1979 film called METEOR. Despite starring SEAN CONNERY and NATALIE WOOD, you may not have heard of it, likely because it’s shockingly awful. But I’d been looking out for it for years on the strength of the photo novel I can remember from back in the day. The aforementioned INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN, although suitably sticky and icky thanks to RICK BAKER’S brilliant makeup effects, is also pretty dire. Poor films clearly benefitted from the format!
But here’s the main reason. I dug out my copy of the ALIEN photo novel, and I thought I’d share it. Hilariously, I note that it’s actually the property of 9 year-old ‘Science Officer David John Moody’ (I was an absolute tit as a child). It’s a bit battered, but still in reasonable condition, as you can see from the pictures I’ve shared.
Happy days!
