The Mondo Macabro phenomenon (both the book and the label) is not only a
personal favorite but also a big influence for Shock right from our humble
beginnings. As our 60th issue has a worldwide cinema special, it was about time
for an interview with the man behind the book and the label, Pete Tombs. Before
starting the label, he co-wrote (with Cathal Tohil) Immoral Tales: European
Sex&Horror Movies 1956-1984, published in 1994. It covered European horror and
erotic cinema and directors like Jess Franco, Jose Ramon Larraz, Jean Rollin,
Walerian Borowczyk and others. His second book, Mondo Macabro: Weird and
Wonderful Cinema Around The World was published in 1998. It presented genre
cinema (horror, action, erotic etc) from all over the world, with countries like
Mexico, Brazil, The Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, Turkey and other exotic
destinations. That's where many of us read - maybe for the first time - about
the movies of Brazilian auteur Coffin Joe, the 'Turkish Exorcist' (Sheytan),
Filipino movies about the 'aswang' creatures or Thai movies about the 'krasue'
monsters. Tombs continued with the TV series Eurotika! in 1999, co-written,
co-produced and co-directed with Andy Starke, which had eleven episodes
dedicated to European erotic cinema. 2001 was the year of the Mondo Macabro TV
series, with eight episodes about movies from all over the world. After a
warm-up with the labels Pagan Films and Eurotika, Pete and Andy Starke founded
the Mondo Macabro label in 2002. Since then, the company has been specializing
in DVD and Blu-Ray releases of weird and lost films from many countries. Its
impressive roster includes gems we have covered in the pages of our zine, like
The Beast And The Magic Sword, Seven Women For Satan, Silip: Daughters Of Eve,
Mystics in Bali, Lady Terminator, Alucarda, Satanico Pandemonium:La Sexorcista
and even some Greek cult movies. Tombs has also directed documentaries and has
been a co-producer and executive producer on films like Hell's Ground, Black
Circle and A Field In England. Here is the interview with the man himself, which
was conducted online. I offer him my eternal gratitude for his response and
amazing help as well as for leading the way in so many aspects.
In which city did you grow up and how did you get initiated into cinema-especially horror?
I was born in London and grew up in the 60s-70s. I remember that when my father
came home from work, he would bring newspapers. I think it was the Thursday
Evening News which had small advertisements of new films at the back of the
paper, along with some “ad-mat” black and white graphics. It’s quite nostalgic
and I still remember my feelings about them.
Of course, I was still too young to
watch any of these films but seeing those ads intrigued me. I became quite ill
as a child and was in the isolation ward of a hospital. My parents actually had
to look at me through a glass window. I think that also influenced me somehow at
a pretty young age. Gave me a sense of how strange life can be. Sometime later
we were staying with my paternal grandmother in the North of England, near
Liverpool. My father gave me a book he used to have as a child and suggested I
might enjoy it. It was a collection of Edgar Alan Poe stories. I remember my
grandmother saying: “Oh, they’re very macabre’. I didn’t even know the meaning
of the word macabre back then, but I very much enjoyed those stories.
So, your
introduction to horror was with books and not movies, right?
Yes. That was
during a period when a lot of things were being reprinted as cheap paperback
editions in the UK; for example, the stories of H.P.Lovecraft, which I actually
devoured as a reader. I also remember reading an English reprint of what had
been an Italian book about vampires. The English edition was simply titled
The
Vampire and the book had an introduction by Roger Vadim, who directed
Blood And
Roses in 1960. The original book was put together by an Italian woman, Ornella
Volta who was a friend of Fellini and later became an expert in the work of
composer Erik Satie. I think she was a very important person regarding horror
movies in the 60s, although nobody ever mentions her now. The vampire book seems
to have inspired quite a few film makers at the time. She collected whatever she
could find on vampires, including factual reports and not just fiction.
|
the edition that Pete read |
The
English version was shorter, but it really broadened my horizon as to what horror
was and could be. When I was old enough to go to the cinema and watch horror
movies, we had moved out of London to the country. There was a cinema in the
nearby town which was what in the UK we call a ‘flea pit cinema’. Most of the
time they showed films that were a few years old because they were cheap to
hire. That’s where I saw the films of Roger Corman’s ‘Poe cycle’ and I loved
them. Whenever the AIP logo came out, I instantly knew it was going to be a good
film.
So, surprisingly for an Englishman, you were baptized with American horror
films and not the films of Hammer?
I was too young to go to the cinemas when the
first films of Hammer were playing but Ι watched some of them later. I remember
there was a cinema which had a competition. You had to send in a postcard with
titles of all the Hammer films you knew, and the winner would get two free
tickets for an upcoming Hammer film. Ι won the competition but couldn’t go to
see the movie because those films were X-rated back then and I was too young. I
gave the tickets to my sister who was a few years older than me. Maybe the first
Hammer film I saw later was Dracula, Prince Of Darkness. I also saw horror
movies on BBC late at night. But I do remember that many films that were adapted
from stories I had read didn’t meet my expectations. It took me some years to
realize that literature and cinema are two entirely different things.
Complicated stories don’t really work in horror movies. You can have them of
course and some films can get away with it. I would go to the cinema four or
five times a week and my mother was worried that something was wrong with me! I
remember watching Paul Naschy’s Werewolf’s Shadow and Ossorio’s Tombs Of The
Blind Dead one after the other. I would take a notebook with me and keep notes
in the cinema, basically writing reviews of those movies. There was no internet
or VHS yet. You would see those movies in the cinema and that was it. They would
never appear on TV in the UK.
Did you follow that passion with studies related to
journalism or film?
I did film studies at Middlesex Polytechnic (now University)
and the man who led the main course, Roy Armes, was very nice. He was more of an
expert in French cinema, but he recommended some good movies to me. I studied
sociology as well, if that is connected somehow.
|
Asian Cult Cinema#15 (1996) |
You wrote for Asian Cult Cinema
and I remember your review of Organ in issue 15. Did you write for any other
zines or did you make a zine of your own?
I probably wrote some other stuff as
well. Actually, at first, I was more into music, and I had reviews published for
music papers in the UK, like Sounds and Melody Maker, but I used a different
name. All of these magazines are sadly gone now…
What kind of music were you
into back then? Should I guess it was punk?
It was punk, sure. That was an
exciting time for music in the UK. I saw the Sex Pistols live in 1976 at the 100
Club in Oxford Street. I recall it because it was on my birthday. It was a small
club, and it was full but if you add up all the people who later claimed they had
been there, it would fill a whole stadium. I also liked musicians like Link Wray
and Bo Diddley.
How did your first book, Immoral Tales, come about as an idea
and what about the mysterious Cathal Tohil?
I met Cathal from an ad in a
magazine. There was a late-night TV screening of the Harry Kumel film Daughters
Of Darkness. This one is definitely in my top ten of fantastical films; probably
even in the top three. I haven’t watched it in years because I prefer to watch a
film once and remember how it made a mark on me. I prefer keeping that memory to
watching the film again and destroying my first impression. Anyway, I had a
video recorder but had forgotten to set it, so I put a classified ad asking if
anyone had recorded a copy of that film. Cathal phoned me up and we met. He had
Daughters Of Darkness but also a huge collection of great movies and a network
of people who were collectors.
Was maybe Marc Morris among that network? I used
to trade with him in the past because he was after Greek editions of any Franco,
Rollin or Borowczyk films and he would send me tapes from the UK in return.
Oh
yes, Marc was among them, and I actually met him through Cathal. He was trading
with people all over the world. He’s a good friend and I’ve known him for years.
He actually works with us in Mondo Macabro. Back to
Immoral Tales, Cathal and I
talked about writing something related to movies. He had a fanzine called
Ungawa! (after the sound Tarzan makes as he swings through the jungle) and
wanted to make a proper journal.
|
Ungawa zine (90s), in which Pete also contributed |
We also had some articles written in French,
which I could translate, because I was reasonably OK with the language. As I
started translating those articles, I told Cathal that there was some
interesting stuff there. There was also a book called
The Vampire Cinema by
David Pirie, which was out in the UK and mentioned the films of Jean Rollin.
That book was quite an influence on me, I think. We started exchanging ideas
about what to write in our own book and we met a publishing guy who was
interested in it. Cathal and I made a list of the directors we wanted to cover,
like Rollin, Borowczyk and even Alain Robbe Grillet, who was considered more
intellectual. In fact, I had seen his films and read his books but he later
denied to me that his films had fantastical elements. He was a nice guy but a
bit concerned about his reputation, I guess. For our book, I said I would write
the introduction and we would separate the chapters equally among Cathal and
myself. It took quite some time to be completed because it was not so easy to
find the films we wanted to cover. Both of us had full-time jobs and we also had
to trade with people outside the UK to get the films. Some of those VHS copies
(the French Secam ones) played in black and white on UK TV sets. In fact, I
originally saw all the Rollin films on black and white…
How was the publishing
experience with the first book?
Well, the publisher who was supposed to handle
it went out of business, but at that time I was working for a book distributor
and knew about printing, distribution and all that stuff. So, I told Cathal we
could do it ourselves. We financed it ourselves and published it. It got
re-published by other companies later on, like Titan Books in the UK and
St. Martin’s Griffin in the USA.
The second book, Mondo Macabro, which for many
of my generation is a cinema bible, probably took longer to complete? And how
did you decide to make it?
Interest in Japanese cinema was big during that
period, and someone proposed to me the idea of doing a book about it. I had been
to Japan a couple of times, but I didn’t read any Japanese and didn’t know much
about the history of their cinema, so I thought such a book would be outside my
knowledge. I proposed to do a book about movies from around the world instead;
not including Europe, which we had already covered. We would focus on countries
like Turkey, Greece (which we unfortunately didn’t cover), Brazil, Mexico, The
Philippines etc. I knew some people in those countries, and I thought they could
offer ideas or help. That book took several years to be finished. Another
difficult task was that all the films and information about them had to be
checked. That seemed to take forever. The internet existed then but there was
not much information about those films. For example, there was not much interest
in Indonesian genre cinema back then, so you had to actually go to the country
to do proper research. There were books on Indonesian cinema, but they dismissed
the movies we wanted to cover as B-movies.
How did the title ‘Mondo Macabro’
come about? Was it inspired by the Italian ‘mondo’ movies of the 60s and 70s,
like the Mondo Cane films? And maybe that was combined with the word ‘macabre’
your grandmother said about the Edgar Allan Poe book?
I can’t recall exactly how
I got the title but obviously the Italian mondo films had something to do with
it. Amazingly, when we visited Argentina much later, there was a video shop in
Buenos Aires called Mondo Macabro. But it was just a weird coincidence. We were
there doing some filming and a local guy brought us there to see it. I even took
a photo standing outside the shop. It doesn’t exist anymore, so far as I know.
As for the word ‘macabre’, I am not sure again how it came to me but that word
certainly seemed to play an important role in my life. In general, I was
thinking of a name for the book that would sum it all up. It just kind of came
to me one day out of the blue. You know, when they asked John Lennon how he came
up with the name of The Beatles, he said he saw a dream that said ‘you should be
called The Silver Beatles’.
Did you get material from video labels like
Something Weird or Video Search Of Miami, in order to get rare movies? Or did
you do more localized research?
There was a genre magazine called Psychotronic
which had several ads from American labels like them. They offered VHS copies of
obscure films (this was long before DVD) but it was tough to know what some of
the titles were as they changed them for American release. I had to do a lot of
sourcing in the countries the films were made in.
Did you have a team of writers
or contributors or was it basically your work?
There were people who helped of
course. For example, Giovanni Scognamillo, who is sadly no longer with us,
helped me a lot on Turkish films. His family was Italian but he was born in
Istanbul. He was a very interesting man. When I was doing my research for movies
outside the mainstream, I had found an article about Turkish cinema in a French
magazine. I am not sure if it was
Mad Movies. I just recall it was from the 80s
and the article was written by Gio. When later I was talking with my friend,
Michel Parry, he told me he knew a guy who was knowledgeable about Turkish
cinema, and it was the same Gio! Michel gave me his contact details. I actually
contacted Giovanni by fax, so it was a long time ago. We met when I went to
Istanbul, and he knew everybody in the film business. I remember he took me to a
cafe and all the Turkish actors and stuntmen were there and talking about the
old days. I really liked Turkish cinema, even the mainstream ones. They produced
lots of movies in the golden era of their cinema, especially in the 60s and 70s.
Especially in the 70s, there were some really unusual ones. I think something
similar happened in Greece as well. The 50s black and white films and then came
the golden era.
So, did you travel to every single country that you covered in
your book?
I have been to every country apart from Mexico. Weirdly, a lot of
stuff about Mexican cinema we did in Washington DC. We went there to film for
another reason, actually. We had an interview with a guy who had written a lot
about Mexican popular cinema and also worked at the university in Washington DC.
He knew the Mexican cultural attaché, who lived in the city as well. We assumed
he wouldn’t want to talk about Santo movies and horror films, but surprisingly
he was a big fan and accepted to meet us. His name was Ignacio Duran. We went to
a very grand Victorian building, and it felt a bit weird. However, he was really
nice to us and incredibly enthusiastic about what we were doing. When we told
him we were making a program for TV, he said he could get the Mexican ambassador
to meet us. That didn’t happen but it showed how supportive he was. In fact, he
was one of the people who helped Guillermo Del Toro get the money to make his
debut feature, Cronos. You can never tell. Even people who work as bureaucrats
can be fans of weird cinema!
Was this book a bigger success or maybe more
influential than Immoral Tales?
Although it didn’t have spectacular sales, I
think it did quite well. I know it was the first book to do something like that
and when you are the first, you don’t need to be the best. I felt that people
who were in the countries we covered should be writing that stuff, but they
didn’t, so we had to do it. In some cases, I think we inspired them to do it
later. For example, after our trip to Turkey, a few of the people we had talked
to started to write their own books. One of the people we interviewed was guy
called Metin Demirhan. He was a very talented comic book artist who also had a
film store in Istanbul where he sold comic books, videos, film posters etc.
Inspired by our visit and the
Mondo Macabro book, Metin collaborated with
Giovanni Scognamillo on several books about Turkish popular cinema. Sadly, Metin
died very young.
|
one of the books (in Turkish only) of Scognamillo&Demirhan |
The only book I know that could be similar to Mondo Macabro is
Steven Jay Schneider’s Fear Without Frontiers: Horror Cinema Across The Globe,
published in 2003.
Yeah, he is an American author, and he is now a film producer.
He was definitely influenced by the Mondo Macabro book, because we talked about
it. I actually contributed to his book with an article about Indian cinema.
There were some other more academic writers who contributed to that book. There
were some good sections in it and some that didn’t work. But it’s always good to
see people interested in this kind of stuff. The mainstream sucks up most of the
oxygen when it comes to cinema and genre cinema is left to one side. But I
wanted to be on that side. When I discovered that academics were staring to
build courses around some of what we’d done, I was kind of disappointed. For me,
the interesting thing about this kind of cinema is that it’s outside “the
academy”; it’s outside intellectualism. I’m not saying that the people who made
these films are not intellectuals or intelligent. The genres they worked in were
just not considered respectable. And I personally feel horror films should be
disreputable and in some ways marginal.
Any other thoughts about the Mondo
Macabro book?
It was great to work with people all over the world and discover
the cinema of their countries, as we did for example with the Philippines and
Indonesia. I was an amateur regarding the cinema of those two countries, so it
was a process of discovery. It always has to be that way for me. I’d rather
watch a film I haven’t seen, even if it’s not a good one, than watch someone
everybody is talking about. I like finding stuff that isn’t obvious.
If I am not
wrong, were you involved with Pagan Films (1999-2000)and Eurotika (2000-2001)
labels before starting Mondo Macabro?
Yes, I was behind those two labels as
well. Pagan Films was put together by me and the guy who was Nigel Wingrove’s
original business partner in Redemption Films, Peter Salvage. I think we were
having a drink and he said: ‘what about starting another video label?’. I felt
there was a niche market there, so we started Pagan. Eurotika began after a
series we were asked to do for Channel 4, to show some films and also include
half-hour documentaries on them. As part of buying the rights for TV, we also
got the film rights to release the films in the UK. It was a good experience and
was interesting, for example, to interview some of the people who were part of
the French erotic films of the 70s. Most of them belonged to the late 60s
generation and had been involved in the “events” of May 1968, so they were
influenced by that, opening up an examination of moral standards. I enjoyed
doing that a lot.
Pagan also had some notable Japanese releases, which was
actually a first in the UK.
Yes, one of the first things I wanted to do with
Pagan was having some Japanese releases and I was especially thinking of
Nikkatsu’s roman porno films. I got in touch with Nikkatsu studios, again via
fax (it was in the early 90s), and there was a lady who worked for the company
who could speak English. She sent me a long list of films that were available
for us to buy and she became very interested in helping us. She told me that
nobody had asked about those films for years. She even translated information
about the films into English for us. I think we were the first people back then
to release these films with English subtitles, for example Seijun Suzuki’s
Gate
Of Flesh.
He has become a critically acclaimed name now but at the time nobody
seemed to be interested that we were making these films available in English
friendly versions. Nobody seemed to give a fuck. We were pioneers in doing that,
but we probably did it too early. I also remember going to a film market in
Milan (MIFED), which doesn’t exist anymore. I was there in ‘95 or ‘96 and I met
people from all over the world, including Indonesia, Hong Kong, Taiwan etc.
There were also people selling the rights to genre or horror films, like those
of Dario Argento. All those films could be licensed for small amounts of money
at the time because nobody seemed to be interested in them. That situation has
completely changed now. I actually think that Nigel Wingrove and Redemption
Films team were the first people, at least in the UK, who treated such films
with respect and gave them proper releases.
Oh, I was lucky to get some on VHS
but many of them were cut by the BBFC back then…
Of course, that’s a big problem
in the UK. The idea of age classification is not necessarily a bad thing but
it’s too expensive. It costs a thousand UK pounds to get a certificate to
release a film on video. But that was more or less the profit you were expecting
to make on such a niche release. So, because of that, we couldn’t make any money
with Mondo Macabro. That’s why we actually started releasing movies in the US
and left the UK altogether.
Actually, you are giving me a great chance to jump
to the next question. Did Mondo Macabro start with its base in the UK and at
some point moved abroad? And when did that happen?
In fact, the Mondo Macabro
label started from a TV series, for which we bought all those film rights. First
came the book, then the TV series and finally the label. Our idea about the TV
series was to feature films from around the world, in a format similar to
Eurotika. We made all the contacts with the people who owned the film rights and
Rapi Films from Indonesia was one of the first ones. Then we thought that we
could also release those films on video, which we did. That’s how we released
the Warrior films and some Mexican films. I think our first release was
Alucarda. But the costs to do that in the UK, mostly because of the BBFC, were
too high. Sometimes even the video copies we received from the producers were
not so good. That was a VHS era and most of them were in full frame. The same
had happened with Gate Of Flesh, which was full frame, because they just sent us
the TV master. This is still a problem with films from many countries. It’s hard
to make people understand what kind of materials you need. We want the films in
the original versions that played in the cinemas and also the uncut version.
Sometimes people just zoom in and they give us this kind of ‘widescreen version’
of a full screen film…
Where are Pete Tombs’ collaborators?
Basically, the team
is me and that’s why I am always busy. I also have Jared Auner from the UK, of
course, who does all the limited-edition marketing and mail order. Andy Starke
handles a lot of the financial side of things. Of course, we can’t do everything
in Mondo Macabro, like film restoration, cover design etc, so we give them to
other people. It can be expensive, of course. For the design, for example, I
would like to use the original posters of the films but often that’s not
possible. In many cases the original art can’t be found or it’s not good enough.
Plus, we need to have a Mondo Macabro aesthetic, so people recognize our
releases.
Getting into more details into Mondo Macabro releases, there's an
evident love for Indonesian cinema, since you've released films like Mystics In
Bali, The Warrior, Lady Terminator and Virgins From Hell. What do you think
contributed to the 'trippy' or wild character of Indonesian cinema?
I think it’s
a cultural thing, basically. Indonesia has a rich and colorful mythology and
folktales, full of fascinating stories, characters and creatures. They had a
very prolific comic book industry too, which was also the case with Turkey. The
early popular cinema of Indonesia, like the Warrior films with Barry Prima, was
based on popular comic books. So, the producers had them as a base, in order to
attract people to the cinemas.
Do you follow the new Indonesian horror films
like those of Joko Anwar or the Mo Brothers?
Yeah, I try to keep up and I know
Joko Anwar. We have met a few times. One nice moment I remember was at a film
festival in Italy that I attended, Udine Far East Film Festival. There was a
presentation there and Joko Anwar, whom I didn’t know personally then, was
present. He is a well-known director and screenwriter in Indonesia and a very
interesting filmmaker. In his presentation he was talking about the general lack
of knowledge about Indonesian popular films. In that festival you get a more
intellectual approach to cinema. He was talking about popular films and held out
a copy of Lady Terminator, saying that people should find out about Mondo
Macabro, which has been releasing movies like this. Afterwards I found him and
introduced myself, and we got on really well. I think something similar happens
in other countries as well, where film fans who grew up with movies in the 80s
are now people who make their own films. They look back at things that inspired
them when they were younger, so I think it’s a revitalization and a return to
the spirit of those older films. I believe that Indonesia, The Philippines and
India are really rich places for cinematic subjects, thanks to their mythology
and culture. These are fantasy movies of course but they give them a human
aspect.
Regarding the Philippines, you released Silip: Daughters Of Eve and For
Your Height Only. Is there any extra material from this country that you would
like to unearth, either horror, action or exploitation/erotica (the 'bomba
movies' as they call them there)?
In the Philippines during the golden age of
popular cinema from the 50s to the 80s, all of the people producing those films
were just businesspeople making money from other things, like construction or
trading. They realized there was money to be made from films and started to
invest in them. The films were cheap but covered popular subjects, like horror,
action comedy. But once those films played in the cinemas and made their money
back, the producers didn’t care about them. They weren’t preserved, meaning they
didn’t often keep the negatives in a safe place. The same happened in Turkey. As
for the Philippines, I could easily come up with a list of twenty films I would
love to release but I know their negatives don’t exist anymore. This happens to
us quite often. A VHS or VCD copy of a film is not enough for us to release it.
As far as I know, there is no nationally funded film archive in The Philippines.
Imelda Marcos actually created a film center in Manila in the 80s and asked all
filmmakers to send their negatives, so they could be safely stored there. A lot
of independent producers sent their negatives there but unfortunately the film
center was below sea level. As a result, it got flooded, so all those negatives
were destroyed. Regal Films is one of the major film companies that still exist
and they have some fantastic movies, but they don’t always have the negatives
anymore. Some companies just have a shed and store the negatives there, but they
get absolutely destroyed in the tropical heat. When we licensed a Filipino film
called
Snake Sisters from the director, Celso Ad Castillo, and found the
negatives, we realized they were all stuck together, like a tin full of molten
film. We couldn’t use it at all.
We struck lucky with
Silip as it was that
producer’s first film and he had kept the negatives because he had a strong
emotional connection with the production. He is a very successful businessman
now. The problem with lost or damaged negatives exists in Indonesia and in India
and it’s a sad situation.
Did you contact anyone in Thailand about old films,
like Sompote Sands (RIP 2021), the director of Crocodile, Kraithong etc.?
I
didn’t meet him, and I don’t have any contacts in Thailand, well, apart from you.
But I know Sands had some legal problems regarding the Ultraman franchise. I
knew where the negative of
Hanuman And The Five Riders was and wanted to release
it but I learned about the legal process and thought it wasn’t worth taking the
risk. There are a number of interesting films from Thailand and one I remember
is
Krasue Sao from 1973, which was released on VHS in Sweden. It’s about that
female creature with the flying head. I spent a lot of time trying to find the
negatives for the film, but I don’t think they exist. In Thailand, local artists
made wonderful posters for local and foreign films, like the one for Lucio
Fulci’s
The Beyond. It seems they got some stills from the film and a vague
notion of what the story was and then made up these wildly imaginative posters
that often seem not to have too much to do with the actual film. Piak Poster,
one of the most famous of these poster artists, later became a director in his
own right.
Regarding Japanese horror, you recently released House Of Terrors and
A Haunted Turkish Bathhouse. The latter left me absolutely stunned and I wrote a
raving review of it for the current issue of Shock. Did you have to go to Japan
to acquire the rights?
That film was in fact a suggestion of Jared, who is very
knowledgeable about Asian cinema. We had a connection with Toei Studios, a big
company which has a long catalog of genre films going back to the 50s. We were
going through a catalog of their available movies and originally, I wanted to
choose a couple of films with French actress, Sandra Julien, but for some
copyright reason we couldn’t get them. So we went to the list again and saw what
they had in HD format. Jared suggested
A Haunted Turkish Bathhouse. Well, just
the title is enough, right? We’ve got a couple more like this coming up. I could
say that Japanese cinema is probably my favorite, because they have so many
movies and a wide variety of themes. Japanese cinema has a wide range, from the
high art of directors like Kurosawa to the very lowest, like those shot-on-video
movies of the 80s.
Your roster includes a lot of material from Spain, but I will
focus on two cinematic pillars. One is Franco (you have released Lorna The
Exorcist and The Diabolical Dr.Z, among others) and the other is Naschy (you
have many more of his gems, with the latest being Night Of The Executioner).
Should I assume you love Naschy more? I think I know the answer already, because
of a previous comment you made, but I need to ask anyway.
Well, yes, I like Paul
Naschy’s films more. I was lucky to have met him a few times over the years. He
was very successful and also one of the people who spearheaded this movement of
fantastic/horror films in Spain. Watching Werewolf Shadow was a pivotal moment
for me. I was a fan of horror movies already but this film was something
different. It played at a local cinema I often went to. In the old days, cinemas
in London used to be huge and packed full of people. That changed in the 70s and
80s, so they started to convert them into smaller rooms. Each cinema would be
divided into three or four different screening rooms. I saw Werewolf Shadow on
one of the smaller screens. It was a Wednesday afternoon screening, like a
matinee screening, but for older people on a pension so the tickets were
cheaper. The film was being screened in the smallest theatre. It was like
watching TV with your family. But because it was a 35mm projection on a very
small screen, the colors were absolutely intense. I felt like I was
hallucinating. Especially in the flash-back sequence that shows the beheading
and the blood flowing, the red was amazing. After that, I tried to see as many
Spanish films as I could. Thankfully, there were lots more that came along. I
guess that after Hammer films, when I was young, the next big thing for me was
Naschy. Of course I also liked Italian cinema and directors like Mario Bava, but
Spanish films really appealed to me. They had a kind of earthiness about them.
They were not as sophisticated as Italian films. Spanish cinema was more like
what we call ‘meat and potatoes’, meaning it was more basic. That’s not a bad
thing, actually. They just didn’t worry about making their films look like art.
They were more interested in the stories. Furthermore, the locations they used
were funky. In a way, Spanish films feel more primal to me.
You also released
Greek films by directors like Kostas Karayannis, Kostas Manoussakis, Dimitris
Dadiras, Dimitris Panayiotatos and George Lazopoulos. You were also mentioned by
Jacques Spohr of L'Insatiable in his interview for our zine. When did your interest
in Greek cinema start?
Years ago, I lived in a part of London where there were a
lot of Greeks. Actually, it was a long road which had Greek shops at one end and
Turkish shops on the other. That was in the 80s, which was the era of video, so
I would visit many video stores there. There was a shop run by a Greek guy and
had a lot of local films. I was looking at the covers, but it was very difficult
for me to tell what the movies were about. The covers were kind of comical, with
characters drawn with big red noses and stuff like that. I watched a few of them
and was aware that there was a wide range of Greek films and not just comedies.
Comedies were probably the most popular ones; and movies with stars like Aliki
Vougiouglaki, most of them produced by Finos Films. I knew there was also an
exploitation side of Greek cinema, but it was difficult to find much information.
Sometime during the early 2000s I was invited to the Greek Cult Cinema
Festival in Athens. For various reasons I couldn’t make it, but it started me
thinking that there was something called Greek cult cinema and reminded me of
those VHS tape I’d watched many years before. It was difficult to find out much
information because the Greek alphabet makes it hard to read the titles of the
movies if you’re an English speaker. Maybe this is one of the reasons Greek
films haven’t been much talked about outside the Greek community. There’s a real
lack of information outside the more obvious arthouse films. As an opposite
example, one of the reasons that Hong Kong films became popular was that they
were required by law to be subtitled in English. Therefore, these films were
accessible to people who didn’t speak or read Chinese. That way they were more
exportable. Of course there was also the explosion with the Bruce Lee films
which helped. I think the first Greek films we wanted to release were by Kostas
Karayannis;
Tango Of Perversion and
The Wife Killer. I started online research, and I found the production company behind them. I wrote to them and
asked if we could license these films for a release in the US. I had a total of
five or six Greek movies I was interested in releasing (including Medousa by
Lazopoulos, a film that I really liked), so I went to Greece and met several
people in the business. Making the deal for those films was easy and some of
them had English language versions too.
An interesting story is that when we
released the giallo-esque
The Wife Killer, we didn’t get very good reviews in
the US. One of the things that -male- reviewers commented on was the great
amount of…slapping that goes on in the film. There are men slapping women but also
women slapping men. That felt shocking to them but maybe that’s something that
happens a lot in Greece?
Haha, you could say that. Slapping is like a national
sport for us in Greece. It’s actually a way to degrade someone, especially in
public.
It seemed to shock Americans, even those who were exploitation fans.
Anyway, I found the fact that women slapped men in equal doses made it
acceptable! As for
Tango Of Perversion, I think it’s an amazing exploitation
film. It has drugs, sex, voyeurism (the guy with the two-way mirror filming
stuff) and it even has a bit of necrophilia! It was one of those cases where I
thought that Karayannis was writing his script and saying ‘what would be good to
add here? Should I do it? Yeah, fuck it, I’ll do it’. The film just gets more
and more ridiculously extreme.
Then I went through the film catalog of that
company, and it was all in Greek. Fortunately, Google translate was becoming
usable by then, so I was able to translate the movie titles and get a rough idea
about the films. Most of them were comedies or rural dramas. Some of them were
like Greek westerns. But I discovered
The Wild Pussycat, which I had heard about
before. Of course, in the catalog it was called ‘The Hot Revenge Of Sex’. When I
realized it was
The Wild Pussycat, I knew I wanted it. They sent me the video
master, which was in very good condition, but it turned out to be the alternate
Greek version, which took out most of the explicit scenes with Gisela Dali.
Somebody, maybe Jared, said to me that there was an export print of that film in
the US. We had it scanned and made a composite version. The Greek version cut
the more extreme scenes and replaced them with a plot about a detective tracking
down drug dealers. It’s like two separate films. So, we used fifteen to twenty
minutes from the American print. You can tell when it switches form one to the
other, because the US print is slightly lower quality. One thing unique in the
Greek print was a scene where Kostas Prekas kicks a girl in the stomach and
causes an abortion. This sequence was cut out in the American print… I felt we
had struck gold, because there would be more Greek films to release, but a lot
of them are quite hard to find in an original version. Most of them are cut.
Yes, that's true. The uncut versions are the ones for export, which were shown
in the US, Germany, France and other countries.
We will probably do some
sourcing and release more Greek films. In fact, we will release some next year.
Where did you get the print for Manoussakis’ seminal film The Fear? I remember
an amazing HD version on national TV a couple of years back.
Our print came from
Karayannis & Karatzopoulos. We had it scanned and restored it ourselves.
And
what is your opinion about Greek ‘genre’ cinema, in which the erotic films were
many more than the horror ones? Why couldn't we make horror films like our
neighbors in Italy or Turkey?
Well, this is true. Not many horror films have
been made there. On the other hand, there were directors like Erikos Andreou
(RIP 2023), who directed The Hook with Barbara Bouchet. One of his early films
called Nightmare is like a version of Psycho. That’s a very interesting film and
I think his filmography has some horror moments. Maybe he wanted to make horror
films but the producers in Greece, like Finos or Karayannis & Karatzopoulos,
were not interested in them. Maybe they thought that horror was something made
in America or Britain and wasn’t a Greek thing. Greece has lovely sunny weather,
beaches and islands. That’s not really a place for horror, right? The special
effects are also a problem when it comes to horror. You need special effects
experts in order to make horror films. Of course I remember Island Of Death by
Nico Mastorakis, but it was a film for export and not for the Greek market. I
also know Dracula Of Exarcheia, which is not really a horror film but it’s fun.
There were also a few recent films, like Medousa, and the couple of recent
zombie films, Evil 1&2. We were actually interested in releasing Singapore Sling, but it didn’t happen for a few reasons.
Any plans or thoughts for the future,
regarding upcoming releases, collaborations (a Mondo Macabro 2 book?) or some
endeavor of your own? Maybe start your own film festival?
I have to sleep
occasionally, so a book would have to go on the back burner. We’ve got another
five Greek films coming out, probably next year. As for a film festival, I
couldn’t do it. It’s too much work. I enjoy going to other people’s festivals
because it’s like relaxation for me. But dealing with all the logistics of a
festival seems like a nightmare.
At least you’ll keep running Mondo Macabro as
long as you’re physically able to?
Haha, yeah, until I drop dead or something!
As long as there are still positive things I get out of it, I’ll keep doing it.
There’s a lot of negative things as well. There’s a lot of competition, so
sometimes we want to release something and, bang, someone else has got it. That
can be frustrating, and it keeps happening more and more often. But we have
enough interesting movies planned for release, so no problem. Hopefully, we
could release some Thai stuff as well, like Sompote Sands movies or flying head
monster movies! I think we’ll be around for a few more years at least.
Final note:
This interview was conducted in English and also got translated and published in Greek on issue 60 of
Shock, June 2023. It came along with an on-going special on 'mondo macabro'/exotic cinema from around the world.