Michael H. Price's acclaimed FORGOTTEN HORRORS series of film-history books backtracks to the middle 1940s for a thorough revision and expansion of FORGOTTEN HORRORS VOL. 3. Additional chapters, an entirely new set of illustrations, and fresh insights across the board make for a vivid account of how the independent horror movies dealt with World War II and its immediate aftermath.

The 3rd book in the critically acclaimed Forgotten Horrors series covers forgotten films from 1943 through 1946 and includes an extensive annotations, marginalia and addenda to prior volumes. Films such as Haunted Ranch, The Ape Man, Ghosts on the Loose, Women in Bondage, the Charlie Chan films, Fog Island, The Tiger Woman, etc. are covered as well as many other poverty row and low-budget films of the 1940s. This book is a must have for all fans of classic (and not-so-classic) genre cinema.

The 1940s is a lost decade in horror cinema, undervalued and written out of most horror scholarship. This book deconstructs persistent scholarly discourse by re-evaluating the historical, political, economic, and cultural factors of 1940s horror cinema to recover a decade of horror.

The revised and expanded sequel to Michael H. Price and George E. Turner's groundbreaking "Forgotten Horrors: The Original Volume--Except More So" covers the development of the independent movie studios' approach to horror, weird mystery, and science fiction during a period of banishment for the genre by the British and European boards of censorship. "The notorious Horror Ban of the late 1930s accounted for some dark days in Hollywood," says lead author Mike Price. "The British Board of Censors had been trying its level best since the late silent-era years to keep the creepier fare out of England, but the group had concentrated on individual titles, such as 1932's Island of Lost Souls and Freaks, until a coalition developed with the European censors. The foreign market was lucrative enough for the Hollywood studios that this embargo had some teeth. Strange that the censors neglected to notice the moral lessons implicit in classic horror fiction, usually in a warning about 'tampering with things man was meant to leave alone.' "The ban lasted from 1936-1937 until well into 1939, when the genre enthusiasts had become sufficiently fed up to make a major hit out of the simple reissue of 1931's Dracula and Frankenstein as a double feature," adds Price. "Universal Pictures challenged the ban by reuniting Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi for the entirely new 'Son of Frankenstein' in 1939, and the ban found itself broken." 'Forgotten Horrors Vol. 2: Beyond the Horror Ban' offers an in-depth study of how the prolific smaller studios made it through the ban and rallied in its wake. The new edition covers a stretch from 1938 through 1942, dovetailing with the recently published 'Forgotten Horrors: The Original Volume-Except More So.' New light is directed onto Lugosi's 10 starring features for the tiny studios of PRC Pictures and Monogram Pictures, Karloff's series of 'Mr. Wong' detective adventures, and an unusual series teaming Mantan Moreland and Frankie Darro as an integrated team of amateur detectives. Chapters new to this edition cover the haunted-house comedy 'Comes Midnight, ' the African expeditionary picture 'Dark Rapture, ' and a lowbrow wartime comedy, 'Hillbilly Blitzkrieg, ' that contains a surprising foreshadowing of Stanley Kubrick's 'Dr. Strangelove' (1964). A key chapter, "Beyond the Horror Ban," relates the little-known tale of how one theatre in Beverly Hills provoked Universal Pictures to challenge the censors. The book also shows how subversive elements of terror and creepy mystery insinuated themselves into otherwise conventional films during the span of the ban. Vol. 2 also unearths neglected items from the fabled Tyler, Texas, Black Film Collection at Southern Methodist University-Price was among the original discoverers of that trove of historic motion pictures-and resurrects forgotten performances by such celebrated figures of Old Hollywood as Peter Lorre, Dorothy Dandridge, and Franklyn Pangborn. The survey cuts across many distinct genres, from Westerns to comedies to crime thrillers and disaster pictures, all compiled from primary-source research and exclusive interviews. The Foreword is by Josh Alan Friedman, the author of such books as "Tell the Truth until They Bleed," and (with illustrator Drew Friedman) "Any Similarity to Persons Living or Dead Is Purely Coincidental." The Forgotten Horrors books, which originated in 1980, have been designated as Standard Desk References by the American Film Institute. Five volumes have been completed, with revisions and expansions in place on the first two books, refinements in progress on Vol. 3 and Vol. 4, and additional volumes in preparation. Price and the late George E. Turner originated the series as an offshoot of their research on behalf of the American Film Institute. Price and Turner also are responsible for such books as "The Making of King Kong (Spawn of Skull Island)" (1975-2002) and "The Cinema of Adventure, Romance & Terror" (1989).

First came video and more recently high definition home entertainment, through to the internet with its streaming videos and not strictly legal peer-to-peer capabilities. With so many sources available, today’s fan of horror and exploitation movies isn’t necessarily educated on paths well-trodden — Universal classics, 1950s monster movies, Hammer — as once they were. They may not even be born and bred on DAWN OF THE DEAD. In fact, anyone with a bit of technical savvy (quickly becoming second nature for the born-clicking generation) may be viewing MYSTICS IN BALI and S.S. EXPERIMENT CAMP long before ever hearing of Bela Lugosi or watching a movie directed by Dario Argento. In this world, H.G. Lewis, so-called “godfather of gore,” carries the same stripes as Alfred Hitchcock, “master of suspense.” SPINEGRINDER is one man’s ambitious, exhaustive and utterly obsessive attempt to make sense of over a century of exploitation and cult cinema, of a sort that most critics won’t care to write about. One opinion; 8,000 reviews (or thereabouts.