Coming Next Halloween: Hollywood Halloween Horrors

Next Halloween, Globe Pequot publishes Hollywood Halloween Horrors: The Haunted Holiday in Film and Television, by Edward Moran and James Lantos. It is the first of 7 books in a series we call The Halloween Library.

A new Halloween history for a new generation

This is not another old book of black-and-white pictures. It is a Halloween history for the digital era, written for a new generation that grew up with the movies, the TV specials and now the streaming shows. It has more than 200 images, most of them in color, on a big 8½ by 11 inch page: posters, film and TV stills, infographics, and a set of original caricature posters made for this book.

If you've watched TV or gone to the movies in the past 30 years, you are going to love this book. It pulls out every time Halloween and its themes have appeared in movies and on television. No Halloween book has tackled this before.

How the book came to be

Back in 2017, Edward Moran, a writer in New York City, and I started working on a history of Halloween. It took us 7 years to write a book about 300 pages long. A publisher liked it, but told us it was way too long and needed to be split up. Into 7 books! (Eeeek!)

All told, this first volume is 9 years of work: the research, the writing and rewriting, gathering the pictures, choosing 100 essential posters from an archive of more than 150,000, clearing the rights to the photographs, and drawing the charts that tell the story in numbers.

What's inside

Every chapter has its own collection in this gallery, with the pictures from the book in the order they appear. Click a chapter name to open it.

Chapter 1, Houdini and Hollywood. Where it begins: the magic theaters of Paris, where the very first horror film was made in 1896, Houdini's death on Halloween night 1926, and the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast on Halloween eve.
Chapter 2, Thirteen Films for the Halloween Season. 13 films, from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to The Nightmare Before Christmas, each with an original caricature poster drawn for the book.
Chapter 3, The Modern Scream. Halloween in 1978 and the slasher years that followed.
Chapter 4, Halloween Comes to Television. 16 classic TV Halloween episodes and specials, from Leave It to Beaver and M*A*S*H to Bewitched, Mister Rogers and The Paul Lynde Halloween Special with KISS and Margaret Hamilton.
Chapter 5, The Streaming-Era Halloween. Halloween now: The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror, Stranger Things, Hubie Halloween and more.
Chapter 6, The Horror Hosts. The TV horror hosts, from Vampira and Zacherley to Elvira.
Chapter 7, Salem on Screen. How the movies told the story of the Salem witch trials, from Maid of Salem (1937) to I Married a Witch (1943).
Chapter 8, The Ghostface Effect. Scream and the Halloween mask, with the story of Ben Cooper and the empire of plastic costumes.
Chapter 9, The Halloween Episode. It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and the sitcom Halloween episodes, from Just Shoot Me to Modern Family.
Chapter 10, The Sound of Halloween. Halloween music, with Michael Jackson's Thriller.
Chapter 11, The Archetypes. The witch, from an 1870 spirit-show billboard and the 1903 stage Wizard of Oz to Morticia Addams.

Between the chapters run 4 galleries of the 100 essential Halloween movie posters, chosen with the help of the rankings horror fans themselves have made:

At the back are a Halloween chronology, a film and television chronology, a TV episode guide and a witches filmography, along with the film and television charts and the infographics.

Margaret Hamilton, in her witch's green, with Gene Simmons of KISS on The Paul Lynde Halloween Special, 1976. From Chapter 4

Fred Rogers and Margaret Hamilton on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, 1975 — Fred Rogers and Margaret Hamilton on *Mister Rogers' Neighborhood*, 1975. From Chapter 4

When you can get it

The book comes out next Halloween, or in August, when all the other Halloween things go on sale. The buy button for pre-orders should be up shortly after the new year. Leave your email below and we'll tell you when it comes out.