Avalon Hill, known for historical wargames like Blitzkrieg (1965) and PanzerBlitz (1970) at this point, released the Witchcraft Ritual Kit and Black Magic Ritual Kit on the heels of The Exorcist, the occult blockbuster that saw demon “Captain Howdy” enter the material world (and eventually a 12-year-old girl) via a Parker Brothers Oija Board…
British-born illustrator David Macaulay is best-known for books like Castle and City, where he used his talent for detailed black and white pen and ink drawings to lay bare the mechanics and architecture of his subjects, revealing their inner workings…
The vogue for illustrated mini-encyclopedias of world knowledge came into its own in the postwar period in the West. The spirit of New Frontier, space-age optimism led traditionally non-educational publishers into the educational field, usually by producing striking, lavishly-illustrated, glossy full-color gazetteers on particular areas of knowledge…
By the summer of 1979, the inhabitants of the north of England were living in a state of barely suppressed terror: for the previous four years, a serial killer dubbed the Yorkshire Ripper had been attacking and murdering women in an area centering around the industrial city of Bradford in West Yorkshire…
Caedmon’s vast catalogue of abridged texts—read by acclaimed actors or by the authors themselves—was hugely eclectic, ranging from Pakistani actor Zia Mohiuddin reading selections from the Bhagavad-Gita and Colette reading passages from her Gigi and Cheri to Rainer Maria Rilke reading his poetry in the original German, Boris Karloff reading Three Little Pigs, and Eartha Kitt reading a selection of African folk tales…
There Will Come Soft Rains (Будет ласковый дождь) is an animated film produced in the former Soviet Union, based on the Ray Bradbury short story of the same name. Though obscure in the rest of the world during the Cold War, it has gained a cult following in recent years…
Buoyed by the vast amount of genre fiction and film in circulation, as well as widespread fascination with the occult, which had bled over into the mainstream from the counterculture, interest in supernatural phenomena was perhaps at a historical peak in late 1970s Britain…
Although the slasher film developed out of Italian giallo films, particularly the work of Mario Bava, the genre began with Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), which was extremely controversial at the time for its graphic violence, sexuality, and the final act’s depiction of a cross-dressing Norman Bates…
Italy’s shift from an agricultural to an industrial economy in the period following the Second World War brought with it transformative effects for the entire nation: there was a wave of migration from the poorer south of the country to the rapidly industrializing north, where much of the manufacturing base was located—particularly Turin, home to the vast Fiat factories—which brought with it an enduring exchange of traditions and habits…
Of course it had to be the 1980s. We humans are prone to our periodic outbreaks of mass insanity—and there were no lack of those over the 20th century—but perhaps only the 1980s could have brought together the most garish fringes of popular culture and a repressed but growing fear of the horrors lurking beneath the increasingly preppy surface of Western society…
