Carl Abrahamsson: Sleaze, please!

John Szpunar's hefty brick of a book Xerox Ferox: The Wild World of the Horror Film Fanzine takes you on a gloriously sticky memory lane trip to the golden era of Horror- and Sleaze film fanzines. It's massive (800 pages!), packed with interviews with writers and editors and creates a longing back to an era of a relentless will- and passion-driven love of movies. As such, an invaluable book.

Early 80s up until the internet buds of the early 90s. Postal networking and printed matter. The dawn and heyday of cassette culture and home video. VHS collecting and fanzine devouring. Tape trades and xeroxed xeroxes. Every little scrap of Entartete information and outsider esthetics was regarded as gold and jewels in a mainstream 1980s culture that was tasteless and truly horrible beyond belief. Sleazy diamonds in the rough buried deep in the pastel-colored and Stock-Aitken-Waterman-sounding fields of normality manure.

It's hard to describe what a passionate era this was. I was stuck in my own little spaceship in Stockholm, yet was in touch with a whole bunch of weird, similar-minded people. They all had some kind of cottage industry going, whether it was the illicit spreading of "cult" films or publishing fanzines about them. To be a consumer part of that psychotronic culture was an adventure and a schooling that I can still tap today. It was also a huge inspiration for my own fanzine attempts with Lollipop and Acts Of Interstellar Torture (1985-1988).

It goes almost without saying: the more extreme, the better. Gore- and splatter epics with non-existent budgets and non-existent morals (a great combination). Sexploitation and roughies laughable by the standards of the day, but you could sense how vile they had once been, only 10 to 20 years earlier. Monster movies, sex, violence, giallos, mondos, cannibals, sensationalism and cheap thrills conveyed by second (or third) generation VHS cassette copies, duplicated by manic sleaze hounds all over the world for the benefit of the likeminded. Outsider solidarity drenched in fake blood.

Those of us unfortunately not present on 42nd Street in New York or other Hell-hubs had to rely on the printed matter. Or xeroxed matter, rather. Cheap fanzines like Gore Gazette, Sleazoid Express and Fear of Darkness complemented the subscriptions to Fangoria and other slick magazines. There were reviews, interviews, retrospective articles, filmographies and unbelievable human destinies banged out on imperfect typewriters and then cheaply copied just for the hell of it. No financial gain possible, or even desired. Just a love of sharing that odd, offbeat, oscillating, human (all too human), loser, outsider culture.

John Szpunar's Xerox Ferox takes you right back to that ultra-creative vortex of gonzo publishing. It's a book that reveals how nerdy the scene actually was, but also how passionate it was – perhaps that's actually the same thing? A lot of the people interviewed in the book share trails: late night American TV and its B-movie horror fillers, the last throbbing era of grind house cinemas, Forrest Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, etc. It was indeed a generational phenomenon.

Some writers were tougher than others and the monsters of B-land were sometimes not enough – predominantly those writers blessed with access to real sinning and real sleaze. New Yorkers generally accepted the area around Port Authority and Times Square as disgusting areas of decay. But the sleaze hounds of course loved it. Not least for the cinemas that ferociously mixed without ever matching: porn, horror, art films, whatever. Cinemas decidedly not safe to enter, for many different reasons.

Sleazoid Express was seminal in this environment and both Sleazoid protagonists Jimmy McDonough and Bill Landis are interviewed in Szpunar's book. As is Stefan Jaworzyn of Shock Xpress. As is Jim Morton, who was instrumental in the groundbreaking west coast endeavor for RE/Search: Incredibly Strange Films. As is Chas Balun (A Deeper Shade of Red), Robin Bougie (Cinema Sewer) and Steve Puchalski (Slimetime). And many, many others.

Szpunar asks Jimmy McDonough what it was about the films of Milligan, Meyer, Sarno and Lewis that made the era so special and memorable:

McDonough: "They were handmade. When the budget is $1.50, the personality can't help but bleed through. As well as grimy reality. If you want to know what a certain year feels like, find an exploitation film from that time. You can smell the hot dogs. These days, slickness is available to everyone for that same $1.50. Not so exciting, if you ask me. But that's the way of the world. You can't go back. I'm just glad I was there to see some of it, even if it was only the death rattle."

McDonough's answer about the movies could equally well sum up the fanzine scene of those days. Obsessions and personality leaked through on every xeroxed page and made you, as a reader, want to indulge even further in whatever these people were writing about.

The internet changed a lot of course, for good and bad, and killed off the DIY printed matter endeavors. RE/Search's wonderful Incredibly Strange Films and Michael Weldon's The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film carried the torch onwards on a higher level and the interest as such didn't fade. Reality did, however, and 42nd Street being cleaned up in the early 90s became the best (worst!) symbol of the end of an era.

Through loving and intelligent endeavors like Szpunar's Xerox Ferox, those of us who remember the good old days can become vitalized again. I still have all of my VHS cassettes (probably close to 500 tapes) and now feel motivated to drag them out again. For those slightly younger who may think that VHS is a disease of sorts (in a way, it is), the book presents a great overview of a culture that was instrumental in presenting many forgotten films again. Thereby saving them not only from oblivion but also possibly from terminal extinction.

If the subject matter interests you, you might want to read my interview with Sleazoid Express' Bill Landis from 2005.

Xerox Ferox: The Wild World of the Horror Film Fanzine, by John Szpunar, Headpress, London 2013.

All material on this blog is copyright © Carl Abrahamsson, unless otherwise stated. The beautiful images from 42nd Street have been appropriated from various online sources. Please let me know if you own these images and feel their use here is not OK. Thanks.