Gothic for Radicals: The Horror Films of Gordon Hessler and Christopher Wicking

WHO WERE GORDON HESSLER AND CHRISTOPHER WICKING?

Between 1969 and 1971 director Gordon Hessler and writer Christopher Wicking collaborated on four unique and challenging horror movies for independent production company American International Pictures: The Oblong Box, Scream and Scream Again, Cry of the Banshee and Murders in the Rue Morgue. These four works from Hessler and Wicking have been undervalued and little explored by most film critics and historians. Yet, they represent artistic extensions of, and in some cases reactions against, the traditions of gothic cinema that had become prevalent in the previous decade. They also work as metaphors about the turbulent times in which they were made. Their neglect seems even more puzzling since the first three starring Vincent Price received wider distribution and grossed more at the box-office than almost any other low-budget genre efforts of their time. Most critics and historians consider them only in comparison to the works by directors Roger Corman and Michael Reeves that have genre similarities instead of appreciating the quite different approaches to this material introduced by Hessler and Wicking.


In 2020, author Steve Haberman received his PhD in Film Studies from De Montfort University in Leicester, England. He earned his BA in Cinema from the University of Southern California, from which he graduated Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa. Haberman wrote the stories and screenplays for four produced studio features, three of which with Mel Brooks, including Life Stinks and Dracula, Dead and Loving It.

In the last ten years, Haberman received three Prime Time Emmy Award nominations for producing the HBO comedy specials Mel Brooks and Dick Cavett - Together Again, Mel Brooks Strikes Back and Mel Brooks Live at the Geffen. Brooks also asked Haberman to produce and direct the definitive personal chronicle of his film career, Mel and His Movies. Shout Factory released it as part of their DVD set, The Incredible Mel Brooks in 2012.

In 2003, Luminary Press published Haberman’s book on the history of silent horror films, Silent Screams: Chronicles of Terror, which is still in print. His next book, a critical study of Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death, was released in 2022 by Auteur Publishing, part of the Liverpool University Press in England, in their Devil’s Advocates series.