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The dawn of the video age brought the birth of the so-called “Video Nasties” and suddenly a whole new world of uncensored horror opened up for the UK genre buffs. And what days they were when, all too briefly, non-certificated videos, such as Driller Killer, The Last House on the Left, Zombie Flesh Eaters and Cannibal Holocaust were legally available in uncut form.

Then, in 1984, the Video Recordings Act was changed all that, and the films that warped a generation were forced back underground. But the cult following continued.

Now, they are back with a vengeance in this full colour book containing 74 original full-size video sleeves.

In an age where the star of Hercules In New York can become the Governor of California and a former US President is best remembered for acting with a chimpanzee called Bonzo, the world more than ever resembles an exploitation movie. What better time for an A-Z guide that covers everything from the silent to the present day, with an emphasis on the bizarre, the sick, the twisted and the downright entertaining? From Universal horror classics, gore-soaked drive-in fodder and kung fu obscurities to Asian weirdness, The Spinegrinder Movie Book has it all in one opinionated volume.

The slasher movie is the bloodiest incarnation of the modern horror film, tainted by criticisms of misogyny, yet remaining - on and off - a box-office draw for thirty years. Combining in-depth analysis with over 200 film reviews, Legacy of Blood is the most comprehensive examination of the slasher movie and its conventions to date, from Halloween and the notorious I Spit On Your Grave, to Scream - the re-defining genre hit in the nineties - and beyond.

Jonathan Rigby’s English Gothic: A Century of Horror Cinema is the first book to trace the rise and fall of the Gothic genre from its nineteenth century beginnings to the present day, encompassing the lost films of the silent era, the Karloff and Lugosi chillers of the 1930s, the lurid classics from Hammer’s house of horro and the explicit shockers of the 1970s.

During the 1960s and early 70s, Britain’s Amicus Productions were one of the world’s leading makers of science fiction, fantasy and horror movies, rivalling Hammer Films in popularity with such worldwide successes as Tales From The Crypt, From Beyond The Grave and The Land That Time Forgot. But the story behind the company has never been told - until now.

The product of many years of research, Amicus: The Studio That Dripped Blood tells the story of the studio from it’s birth in the late 1950s, charting the company’s rise through Dr Who movies and horror anthologies like Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors to the prehistoric spectaculars which brought about its downfall in the seventies.

DVD Delirium is the definitive - Region Free - guide to hundreds of DVD video releases from all over the globe, featuring the movies that matter, on the format that matters. After the hugely popular first volume, FAB Press has published the all new Volume 2 in this on-going series.

DVD is the ultimate home entertainment format, but it’s a minefield for the serious collector. If you want to know whether you should buy a particular film, this 640 page book will be your first point of reference. If it saves you from buying even one second-rate DVD, it will have paid for itself right away! Plus, discover masses of brilliant films you did not even know had been released!

Edited by the world’s foremost DVD expert, who is also an enthusiastic and hugely knowledgeable film fan, this second volume in the DVD Delirium series is also a classic of ‘weird’ film criticism! Includes major contributions from world-renowned film journalist Kim Newman and FAB Press regular Tim Greaves.

One of cinema’s most enduring monsters, the zombie has been terrifying audiences around the world for decades. Book of the Dead charts the ghoulish history of zombie cinema, from the creature’s origins in Haitian voodoo to its cinematic debut in 1932’s White Zombie, George A. Romero’s trilogy (which includes the two acknowledged classics of the genre, Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead) and recent blockbuster hits like 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead and Land of the Dead.

Covering hundreds of movies from America, Europe and Asia, this exhaustive history chronicles the zombie’s on-screen evolution from Caribbean bogeyman to flesh-eating corpse. Along the way, Book of the Dead takes in Bela Lugosi B-movies, Italian gore films, Asian zombies, British zombies, blind monk zombies, shot-on-video backyard epics and the videogame phenomenon of Resident Evil. Spanning seven decades of horror movie history with hundreds of stills, artwork, and a comprehensive filmography, Book of the Dead explains why we continue to be so fascinated by these fugitives from the undertaker.

Detailed analysis of the entire history of zombie cinema puts the current spate of living dead movies into context.

More than 300 rare illustrations, many never seen in print before.

An exhaustively researched filmography covering every single important and/or accessible zombie film ever made.

From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, Italian exploitation moviemakers produced the most vividly gory horror movies ever made - using the recurring plot devices of Third World cannibalism or putrified ‘zombie flesh eaters’ returned from the dead. Eaten Alive! comprehensively tells the story of this outrageous period, setting it within its cultural and cinematic context.

An illustrated, chronological film-by-film history of Italian cannibal and zombie movies, it includes irreverent but informative contributions from such legendary figures of the horror genre as David J. Schow, ’splatterpunk’ author and screenwriter of The Crow, Herschell Gordon Lewis, the godfather of the gore movie. Other contributors including horror novelist Ramsey Campbell, film critic and science fiction author Kim Newman, horror anthologist Stephen Jones, TV cult-movie presenter Mark Kermode and gothic-horror expert Prof. Christopher Frayling all add authoritative material to this unique compendium.

A grassroots subculture has built around the ultraviolent Italian movies highlighted in Eaten Alive! Cannibal Ferox, advertised as ‘the most violent film ever made’, has recently been released on DVD by American distributor Sage Stallone, son of Sylvester; in the late 1990s, Quentin Tarantino’s distribution company, Rolling Thunder, gave a theatrical release to the surreal zombie pic The Beyond; recent graphic novel adaptations of spaghetti gore films include The Beyond and Zombie, emphasising their cult status among young fans. Contributors to the book also include several legends of modern American horror: apart from Schow and H. G. Lewis, there is Brian Yuzna (director of cult US zombie movie Re-Animator), Gunnar Hansen (Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), and Jim Van Bebber (director of ultraviolent cult movies Deadbeat at Dawn and Charlie’s Family).

From the publisher’s description:

During World War I, the Catholic church blocked the distribution of government-sponsored VD-prevention films, initiating an era of attempts by the church to censor the movie industry. This book is an entertaining and engrossing account of those efforts - how they evolved, what effect they had on the movie industry, and why they were eventually abandoned. Frank Walsh tells how the church’s influence in Hollywood grew through the 1920s and reached its peak during the 1930s, when the film industry allowed Catholics to dictate the Production Code, which became the industry’s self-censorship system, and the Legion of Decency was established by the church to blacklist any films it considered offensive. With the industry’s Joe Breen, a Catholic layman, cutting movie scenes during production and the Legion of Decency threatening to ban movies after release, the Catholic church played a major role in determining what Americans saw and didn’t see on the screen during Hollywood’s Golden Age. However, notes Walsh, there were serious divisions within the church over film policy. Bishops feuded with one another over how best to deal with movie moguls, priests differed over whether attending a condemned film constituted a serious sin, and Legion of Decency reviewers disagreed over film evaluations. Walsh shows how the decline of the studio system, the rise of a new generation of better-educated Catholics, and changing social values gradually eroded the Legion’s power, forcing the church eventually to terminate its efforts to control the type of film that Hollywood turned out. In an epilogue he relates this history of censorship to current efforts by Christian fundamentalists to end “sex, violence, filth, and profanity” in the media.

Everybody makes mistakes. But when television makes them, they are viewed by millions of people and captured forever on videotape, to be watched and talked about for generations to come. What Were Thinking? counts down the top 100 most memorable mishaps in television history, Organizing the material in this manner invites readers to discuss and debate whether Cop Rock was really a bigger fiasco than The New Monkeys, or whether the presentation of Elvis Presley only from the waist up on The Ed Sullivan Show was a sillier bit of censorship than the coverage of Barbara Eden’s belly button on I Dream of Jeannie. The blunders in this compendium take many forms - good and bad, casting catastrophes, and TV “events” that weren’t. Each entry is covered in a detailed essay.