Theatre of Blood

Series Editor:  Neil Snowdon
Cover Illustration:  Stephen J. Cark
Cover Design: David Chatton Barker

IMAGINE IF YOU WILL that the BFI had a disreputable cousin, a Northern Grindhouse with tastes a little darker and stranger. With staff who love their movies with a passion that borders on religious zeal, who know you by name and welcome you in as they throw the doors open at midnight. Whose programming runs the gamut of worldwide genre film making, praising the strange, the unusual, the weird and forgotten.

Sounds good?

Then step inside the ELECTRIC DREAMHOUSE! A new cinema imprint from PS Publishing and Editor Neil Snowdon . . .  Settle down and get comfortable as we raise the curtain on our ‘MIDNIGHT MOVIE MONOGRAPHS’—an ongoing series dedicated to outstanding genre titles that just don't get the attention elsewhere. Written by genre authors, film makers and some of the finest critical voices on the scene, bringing a unique perspective to films they love, these are not dry academic texts. They are passionate, incisive, and inspiring explorations that go deep, from writers who know and love the genre inside out. Expert— indeed award winning—practitioners in their field.

THEATRE OF BLOOD (1973) Directed by Douglas Hickox

It is notoriously difficult to mix Comedy and Horror. Rare are the examples where one element does not overpower the other: BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS, EVIL DEAD 2 . . . ATTACK THE BLOCK?

But perhaps no film gets it so spectacularly right as THEATRE OF BLOOD. And perhaps no actor has ever embodied the twin masks of Comedy and Tragedy so perfectly as Vincent Price in what is, arguably, his finest role. A perfectly pitched, deliciously arch slice of Gothic Grand Guignol, with a supporting cast that reads like a veritable ‘Who’s Who’ of British character actors, THEATRE OF BLOOD is:
“Sublime . . . a perfect marriage of genuinely gut-wrenching gore and moments
of quite hysterical comedy.”—Reece Shearsmith

Limited to 500 numbered hardcover copies