The Cinefantastique

Frederick S. Clarke's Cinefantastique magazine, launched in the early 70's, one of the greatest ever, was inspired by Eric Losfeld's midi/minuit Fantastique, which debuted in the 60's.

Losfeld's magazine (entirely in French) was the first in publishing history to cover the genre seriously. Clarke picked up the baton in the U.S. and produced dozens of stunning issues (with spectacular cover art) devoted to little known luminaries such as Hans J. Salter, unseen cult films (at the time) such as The Wicker Man, and directors such as David Cronenberg and George Pal.

 

 

For mine, the magazine became less interesting when the genre itself became more mainstream (ironically). Clarke's double issue devoted to Star Wars, then subsequent issues devoted to fare such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, while extraordinary for their penetrative examination of these cultural phenomena, were indicative of a new, more commercial direction for the magazine, a direction that saw more marginalized genre films receiving less attention. 

 

After years of struggling to pay the bills, it's understandable that Clarke embraced what sold. Only an independently wealthy man could have chosen to ignore the call of commerce.

Although the magazine did eventually die, leaving an almost unrecognizable corpse, Clarke's spirit of affording the genre some serious consideration endured with magazines such as Tim Lucas's Video Watchdog, Richard Klemensen's Little Shoppe of Horrors, Gary J. Svehla's Midnight Marquee, and the French L'Ecran Fantastique.

Even though there is a deluge of information on the genre these days, there is still something very special about something you can hold in your hand that is dedicated to in-depth analysis of it. Print possesses a permanence, an authority, a sincerity that data on a computer screen does not.

I treasure my collections of these wonderful magazines, and still feel the texture of the connection they make to my childhood. On Saturday mornings, I'd catch the 'Red Rattler' train into Melbourne's CBD, bound up the station steps, flee into the busy street, and sprint four blocks to Space Age Books, a titan of destinations that was more like a church than a bookshop. It offered me the safety of a church, and there was reverence for that which I held dear.

Entering Space Age Books and its kaleidoscope of wonders was akin to arriving on another planet, a planet where my kind were welcome, where flights of imagination were encouraged, and where our hearts were consoled with our minds.

These magazines still smell of that long deceased bookstore, a brick and glass monument to dreaming.

The Twinkling Twilight of Mr. Rollin

It's hard to believe it, but he's gone.

He's no longer with us. For the first time in our lives, we live in a world without Jean.

He'd been sick for a long time, but he forged on despite the hardships.

That's how powerful his passion was. Like a priest's calling to God, his devotion to filmmaking was a vocation.

When I was a kid, he was someone I read about. His work was impossible to find, but there were stills in books like David Pirie's The Vampire Film that iced my nerve endings and ignited my sense of wonder. So THIS was cinema???!!!

In a dusty second hand bookshop I discovered a magazine called Midi Minuit Fantastique, an incredible labor of love that often devoted pages and pages to the work of Mr. Rollin.

The magazine would inspire the late Frederick S. Clarke to create the American Cinefantastique, another incredible tome, at least under Clark's watch.

Ironically, Rollin's often maligned (by many) and deeply loved (by a loyal few) work would inspire others to create and re-create and venture deeper into long buried genres in order to unearth treasures as precious as his.

Few, of course, were ever quite THAT precious.

Midi Minuit, to me, was like a shrine to the marginalized films of the imagination, and Jean was one of its gods. He existed in a twinkling twilight to me, a world where creation was not second guessed by a man in a suit or polluted by too much money. His work, finessed on the penny pinching planet of his unique imagination, always stood apart from the rest because its orbit was deliciously unconventional.

Rollin was not a consenting role model to me as a filmmaker, but he was a role model in so many ways. His eternal struggle to make films from his heart made my struggle (also eternal) a little bit easier. If Jean could keep pushing the barrow, so could I. If Jean could persevere, so could I. If Jean could dare to embark on a project driven only by personal faith, so could I.

My film Defenceless was certainly partly inspired by Jean's Living Dead Girl and fueled by a mutual love of the sea.

Already I sense the yawning hole he's left, a hole that can only be filled with sweet memories of first encounters and shared new encounters with his celluloid children.

Mr. Rollin, you came and went and bequeathed us a mint of wonders.

Thank you so much.

Midi Minuit and the Jupiter Hunt

This still from Rene Cardona's La Terrificante Bestia Humana (Night of the Bloody Apes aka Sex Beast, '69) is but one of the many treasures residing in midi/minuit Fantastique No. 24.

A film I like very much, it was afforded great respect within these pages.

Before Cinefantastique and before L'Ecran Fantastique, there was midi/minuit Fantastique, the brainchild of Eric Losfeld.

Like me, it was born in '62, and its first subject for deep analysis was Terence Fisher.

In subsequent issues, it covered King Kong, Roger Corman, Jean Pierre Mocky (a wonderful, underrated figure), Jacques Torneur, Edgar G. Ulmer, Roman Polanski, Pierre Etaix (one of France's greatest comedians/filmmakers), and Koji Wakamatsu.

I can't understate how far ahead of its time this magazine was. In the 60's, nobody was taking fantasy, horror, and science fiction films as seriously as this.

In this 24th issue, for example, over forty pages were devoted to the life and work of Gaston Leroux, the French pulp writer behind Phantom of the Opera and a myriad of amazing tales that energized the genre for generations.

Jupiter (France, '71)

I was very young when I came across a large stash of these magazines. I've managed to unearth and experience many titles found within its covers, but the film from which this still was taken, Jupiter (Jean Pierre Prevost, 71), has eluded me.

Has anybody reading this seen Jupiter? Perhaps it's been retitled? Released in a dubbed version somewhere? If you know anything about it, please let me know. Then we'll all know.

Clearly, it focused on vampirism. This image shares visual similarities with Count Yorga, so I am extremely eager to see it. I've been fascinated with this film for decades, but my attempts to unearth a copy (in any format) have been fruitless so far.

If there are other films that you've obsessed about for decades, I'd like to know what they are. Please write.

Jupiter's director, Jean Pierre Provost, has 31 imdb credits, and appears to have moved into TV early on in his long career. He directed as recently as 2008.

I read about Jean Rollin, one of my favorite directors, in midi/minuit long before I saw an actual moving frame of his work. Although I understood no French in my pre- and early teen years, a helpful neighbor lady translated several articles for me in exchange for babysitting duties.

I still remember her reading this piece on Rollin to me. It was fascinating and magical, and I was buoyed by the fact that my lady translator was becoming passionate about these films also, even though she had not seen any of them.

Thus began my love for one of cinema's most idiosyncratic and individualistic filmmakers.

Mr. Eric Losfeld could not have dreamed that Mr. Rollin's work would one day be honored with editions such as this:



It's been a fascinating journey from mid/minuit Fantastique to the genre blogosphere.

Plague of the Zombies

Growing up in Australia meant having access to a lot of great British publications like The House of Hammer. Although I loved Famous Monsters for its clubby vibe, I can't say I enjoyed Uncle Forry's penchant for puns. A pun once or twice is fine, but all the time?

For mine, what Cinefantastique was to the serious American genre fan, The House of Hammer was to the British genre fan. Both magazines treated the films I loved with respect. I know Forry respected the genre personally, but the juvenile nature of the mag inspired me to look for alternatives.

In an earlier blog, I posted pages from the The House of Hammer's comic adaptation of Vampire Circus:

http://phantomofpulp.blogspot.com/search?q=vampire+circus

I thought it was high time I posted snippets from their Plague of the Zombies edition.

Artists Trevor Goring and Brian Bolland contributed frequently to the magazine, and clearly understood Hammer lore.

More dramatic and tighter than the John Gilling film, they were able to focus on the essence of the movie while discarding the slower passages.

It's important to remember that movies didn't exist on videotape until the late 70's. Comic adaptations such as these were one of the few ways a fan could "own" and relive their favorite movie. Some films were releases in truncated form on Super-8, but ownership of projectors was marginal.

I first saw stills from Plague of the Zombies in one of Alan Frank's horror movie books. The title and the stills intrigued me. The film was made in '66, so I wasn't in any state to make my way to a cinema at the age of four. I'm not sure how broad its release in Australia was.

In the early 70's, I discovered John Burke's novelization of Plague and a number of other Hammer films. I read it with great enthusiasm and loved it. My desire to see the actual film skyrocketed.

Happily, encountered the real thing on videocassette was not a letdown. Some critics have dismissed the film as a Night of the Living Dead rip-off. As doctor Zachery Smith would say: "Bah!!!"

For starters, the film was made two years before George Romero's watershed. Secondly, the story plumbs traditional zombie history with a voodoo subplot. Romero's film took off from a vastly different launching pad.

My imdb review ran like this:

With such an evocative title as "Plague of the Zombies", could Hammer possibly have gone wrong? Of course they could have, but they didn't... because this is one of their finest efforts ever, up there with "Horror Of Dracula", "Twins of Evil", "Vampire Circus" and "The Curse of Frankenstein". The film's undead denizens have closer ties to the zombies of voodoo-ridden Haitian folklore than the Romero-inspired eaters of human flesh. In Haiti, the dead are resurrected to labor for the living. This is the premise here, and it's a fascinating one.

Director John Gilling ("The Reptile") takes the subject matter by the horns and delivers a creepy, fascinating, low key tale of terror that eschews traditional Hollywood zombie lore and brings unexpected pathos to the plight of the exploited dead. The scenes of the dead rising are stunningly realized and the dusty locale is a major plus. A classic. Also worth noting is John Burke's excellent novelization of the film (from Pan).

I really love this film, and I treasure my complete collection of House of Hammer magazines (which underwent some curious name changes in their pulp lifetime).

Magazine Wars

This striking premier issue of Incredible Science Fiction, sporting a very handsome publicity shot of The Creature (From The Black Lagoon) grabbed my attention back in '78.

The magazine industry was jumping on the sci-fi bandwagon in an attempt to cash in on the hysterica surrounding the success of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

As a long-time collector of monster mags, I appreciated the slightly retro appearance of this new contender in the market and and its uncluttered design. If there was a second issue, I never saw it.

The same Chicago-based company was simultaneously publishing Science Fantasy Film Classics.


Although its mightiest competitor was New York-based Starlog, which was already three years old by the time the fantasy wave hit, another Chicago-based enterprise, Frederick Clark's Cinefantastique, the most excellent of all English-language mags, may have been in this company's sights also.


Despite the straightforward design, topical focus, and pull-out poster, Science Fantasy Film Classics offered nothing content-wise to distinguish it from its competition.

Skewing towards an older demographic than Famous Monsters and a younger demo than Cinefantastique, it was a curious combination of Starlog and their sister publication, the long defunct, hard science fiction-focused Future magazine.


For my money, nothing came close to the almost scholarly perspective on the genre of Cinefantastique (an unofficial grandchild of the French midi/minuit Fantastique).




Science Fantasy Film Classics and Incredible Science Fiction were as serious as a car crash about making money, but their love for the genre seemed opportunistic and pandering.

They faded quickly.