INTERVIEW WITH PETE TOMBS, FROM SHOCK#60

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.