While monster movie fans show love to our favorite creeps throughout the year, our fandom naturally gets amped up during the month of October when everyone else catches up with our spooky obsessions.
Noted author and researcher Mark Voger takes advantage of this fact with the release of his follow up to Monster Mash called Son of Monster Mash this October.
The hardcover Son of Monster Mash (currently available at your local comic shop and bookstore or directly from TwoMorrows Publishing) is an excellent continuation of Voger’s look at the monster culture of the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, proving that the author had even more monster fuel left in the tank for a sequel!
We got a chance to speak to Voger again about Son of Monster Mash in this exclusive interview with the author.
It has been a number of years since the release of Monster Mash. Every great monster movie gets a sequel, but why did you come back to uncover more “Monster Kid” culture?
Mark Voger: Thanks for having me back, Nick. After Monster Mash came out in 2015, folks were asking if I would do another monster book. At the time, I was keen to do a book about hippies and psychedelia, which became Groovy (2017). More topics presented themselves — Christmas, the British Invasion, TV superheroes — but I always kept the idea of a Monster Mash sequel in the back of my head. It kind of gestated, you could say.
How did you decide which topics to enhance or cover this time around?
Voger: Well, the original Monster Mash was really about the whole Monster Craze phenomenon in the 1950s and ’60s — the toys and games and model kits, and contemporary media like The Munsters, The Addams Family, Dark Shadows and the hit song by Bobby (Boris) Pickett. I figured a sequel should take a deeper dive into where the monsters actually came from. So in Son of, we’ll examine the novels by Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker; the silent classics (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu); and of course, the Universal classics. Between 1931 and ’48, Universal really created the template for the Monster Craze.
One of the big new topics in Son of Monster Mash is the birth of the 3-D craze. How was this trend fueled by monster films?
Voger: It just so happened that horror and sci-fi were the perfect genres for 3-D. When Warner put out House of Wax (1953) starring Vincent Price, it was a mainstream hit, a big entertainment in widescreen, Technicolor and 3-D. To paraphrase Levy’s rye bread, you didn’t have to be a horror fan to love House of Wax. It was followed by It Came From Outer Space (1953), Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954), Revenge of the Creature (1955) and others. But there weren’t a ton of 3-D horror movies, mostly because the fad petered out.
You have a ton of interview sections with some of the luminaries from this era. Do you have a favorite story or anecdote in the new book?
Voger: This one isn’t in the book, but it still makes me laugh. In 2000, I interviewed Haruo Nakajima, who played Godzilla in 13 movies including the first. Mr. Nakajima spoke no English, nor did I speak a lick of Japanese. His traveling liaisons kindly translated my questions. As Mr. Nakajima answered each question, I would smile and nod, just to kind of encourage him. At the end, he then asked me a question. He thought I knew Japanese from my smiling and nodding!
You do a lot with Roger Corman’s Poe cycle of films starring Vincent Price, and Hammer’s British horrors with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. How did these two series help support the classic Universal films fandom and go places that they didn’t (or couldn’t)?
Voger: Hammer and the Poe cycle modernized the horror film. The two series had solid production values, excellent music, scripts, color, widescreen, and “real” stars in Lee, Cushing, Price and other players like Hazel Court, Herbert Lom and Ingrid Pitt. Corman hired veterans like Ray Milland, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Basil Rathbone. The horror film matured thanks to these series. The bar was raised.
Why were masks and Halloween such an important piece in the monster puzzle during these years?
Voger: I think it’s the mystery of a person wearing a mask. Who is behind the mask? That anonymity is the reason drunks at Halloween parties become brazen flirts. Or shy kids suddenly become extroverts once they pop on the giant head of a team mascot. As for Halloween itself, it’s kind of perfect, isn’t it? A day when you can dress up as anything; get free candy; plus it’s spooky-themed? When all of that dawned on me as a little kid, I thought it was a day created just for me.
You have an entire section on monster/horror comics and the backlash against them. Was this a risk to all monster culture at the time?
Voger: It certainly was, for a time. Look, no publisher wanted to sell comics with rotting corpses to 5-year-olds. But after the Kefauver hearings, there were no allowances for adult consumers who enjoyed this type of material. It broke my heart when (EC publisher) Bill Gaines said he sanitized EC’s output, but the bundles still came back unopened. That’s blacklisting, not to mention a sinful waste of paper, ink and effort. Dell, who published Disney comics, and Gilberton, who published Classics Illustrated, were given an automatic pass. Both publishers wound up breaking the horror ban — Dell with adaptations of Dracula, Frankenstein, etc., and Gilberton with Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. It was almost subversive.
You put out Futuristic: Rockets, Robots and Rayguns of Space Age Pop Culture last year. What do you see as the differences and similarities between both genres during this time frame?
Voger: I know exactly what you mean. Is The Amazing Colossal Man sci-fi or horror? It’s both, but I had to make some hard-and-fast choices. While I was working on Futuristic, I already knew that Son of Monster Mash was in the pipeline. So I asked myself: What, in my heart of hearts, was the filmmakers’ intent? Despite that weird cucumber monster in It Conquered the World (1956), I believe Roger Corman was making a sci-fi film, with his sci-fi-leaning title and plot about a scientist naively welcoming a hostile alien entity. That said, monsters often have sci-fi-ish origins — take The Alligator People, please — as do superheroes. Like, Superman is from Krypton, Iron Man wears hopped-up armor. Science fiction is inescapable, because it reliably leads to science fact.
Are you at work on any upcoming projects?
Voger: I do have a “next” book in the works which I’m pretty far along on. But being Irish and superstitious, I’m not ready to announce just yet. It covers a wild topic … or topics. Unusually for me, the book will be a genre-hopping experience. Tell you what, Nick: Some time early in 2027, you’ll hear from me. If I make it ’til then.
