The Making of Aliens Book

Making of AliensJust when you think there couldn’t be another book released about the Alien series, this Sept. we will have another one to add to the library! Following up with his The Making of Alien book from last year, this year we get The Making of Aliens, once again from Titan Books.

Priced at $60 and 300 pages, this volume tells “the complete story of how Cameron and Hurd, together with their immensely talented cast and crew, brought heroine Ellen Ripley back to the big screen—and upped the stakes by introducing a whole army of aliens for her to face.”

It will features interviews with the cast and crew, filled with tons of photos, illustrations, and concept art, and so much more. There is a reason this film is still loved and worshiped today, so this will be a nice look back at one of our favorites.

Looking for a New Book?

While I continue my quest to add more books to my personal library that I’ll ever be able to read in my lifetime, I thought I would give a little shout out to a few titles that are currently sitting in my Want List on Amazon. I don’t have any of these yet (key word…yet) so all I know about them is what I’ve read on the Amazon description. But they do sound pretty interesting, and I know that I intend to pick them up at some point. While I’m in the middle of reading 3 different books right now, and have a few piled up that I still need to find room in the bookshelves for, it might be a bit.

Who am I kidding, I’ll probably order them next payday!

I’ll list this these alphabetically so it doesn’t look like I’m playing any favoritism!

Ad NauseamAd Nauseam By Michael Gingold
Any horror fan worth their weight in magazines knows Gingold from his decades working for Fangoria magazine, but has been keeping himself quite busy since those days. His book The Frightfest Guide to Monster Movies is just awesome and is simply a must. But his new book is something that older fans will love paging through, as well as giving younger fans a look into the past. In his youth, Gingold would cut out the ads for horror films, the bigger named ones as well as the smaller titles that snuck out. This book is a walk through the 1980’s in a year-by-year guide to Gingold’s archive, featuring more than 450 ads. Remember folks, years before the internet, this is how we found out movies that were playing so these ads had the tough job of capturing the attention of the person paging through the newspaper and make them want to rush out to see this movie. And more times than not, at least for us horror fans, it worked.

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Book Review: Book of the Dead

 

Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema
Published by FAB Press, 2005. 319 pages

Re-Issued by Titan Books, 2014. 376 pages
By Jamie Russell

There are tons of film books on the zombie sub-genre. When this title was first released in 2005, The Walking Dead TV show was still 5 years away from hitting the airwaves. Since that time, books on the zombie culture have flooded the fandom like walkers a Pittsburgh shopping mall. So when this title first came out in 2005, it was long overdue. Finally, someone had taken a very serious look into this sub-genre. But while zombies became really popular in the ’80s, from Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Fulci’s Zombie, they have been around a lot longer than some might realize. That is where this book comes in.

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“Revised and Updated Edition”

As a reference book collector, there are no two words that can fill one with both excitement and dread at the same time as “revised” and “updated” do. The excitement comes because we imagine there is new information that is going to make it worth double-dipping, but at the same time, the dread comes in because we wonder if these ‘extras’ are going to be worth it? Granted, this goes the same for the countless DVD and Blu-ray editions over the years. But this is where I found myself today when I was at the local bookstore and seeing not one, but two volumes that I already had in my library, but both had these words blazing across the top of the front cover.

hammervault-revised

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Book Review: Feeding Hannibal

feeding-hannibal

Feeding Hannibal: A Connoisseur’s Cookbook
By Janice Poon

Published by Titan Books, 2016. 240 pages.

Okay…am I really reviewing a cookbook here on the Krypt? As a matter of fact, I am. But this isn’t just any cookbook, but one made for a cannibal. Okay, not a real cannibal, but one of the most famous ones on TV, Hannibal Lecter. Poon was the chef and food stylist on the show that had to create all the different foods that Hannibal creates for (and of) his guests. This is a real cookbook to make real food. And it is simply art to look through.

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Book Review: Hammer Glamour

hammerglamourHammer Glamour
By Marcus Hearn
Published by Titan Books, 2009. 160 pages.

One of the things that Hammer was known for was the lovely ladies that filled their movies. This book is a celebration of those women. At first glance, you might be disappointed that this isn’t the cheesecake type of book that most would have thought (and probably hoped). Sure, there are plenty of photos throughout this tome, and a few of them a bit cheeky, but most of them are just studio glamour shots of the actresses. But it is an excellent mini-biography book of the many beautiful women that graced their films. We all know the names of Ingrid Pitt, Veronica Carlson, and Caroline Munro, but there are so many others like Diane Clare, all are given a little spotlight, giving us info about their careers and their lives.

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Book Review: The Art of Hammer

artofhammerThe Art of Hammer: Posters from the Archives of Hammer Films
By Marcus Hearn
Published by Titan Books, 192 pages.

There was a time when movie posters were created not only before a single frame had been shot, but sometimes even before a script had been written. An artist was simply given a title and told to come up with a movie poster design for it. This was then used by the studio to try and sell the film before it was even started. Hammer Films did this, but they weren’t the first. But some of the artwork that came out for those movies is just stunning. Now, thanks to Hammer scholar Marcus Hearn, we all can enjoy these incredible pieces of art, but also keep these images alive and well for us collectors.

I know this as cliché as this sounds, this book really is a must. But not just for fans of Hammer Films, fans of movie posters in general, This coffee table size book is filled with beautiful images from Hammer movies from the ’50s to their end in the late ’70s. They display a mixture of close to 300 posters from around the world, from British quads, American 1-sheets, Spanish, Polish, and many others that will make any poster collector just drool. They are divided by decades, with a great index at the end in case you’re looking for a certain title. Each poster has the country from it is from listed, as well as the size of it.

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