If you are looking for pure eye candy (and are fond of movie monsters) this might be an amusing purchase.

He also explores the origins of vampires, zombies, and werewolves reveals the secrets of legendary special-effects wizards and converses with leading movie makers. This sample is for the chapter on Werewolves. Landis presents a personal celebration of the greatest monsters ever to rampage across the silver screen. This is the standard layout for the book. This makes each of the interviews all the more interesting due to the conflicting answers given by each filmmaker. Each interview is about two pages in length and covers the same territory. This sample is for the chapter on Vampires.īetter than these introductions are the conversations that Landis conducts with various filmmakers (such as John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, Guillermo del Toro, Sam Raimi, and Christopher Lee). These introductions are nice, and give the reader a bit of information on each kind of movie monster. There are short introductions for each of the chapters (each of the chapters focuses on different kind of monster). Landis provides his own fascinating and entertaining insights into the world of moviemaking, while conducting in-depth 'conversations' with leading monster makers, including David Cronenberg, Christopher Lee, John Carpenter, and Sam Raimi- to discuss some of the most petrifying monsters ever seen.

Much of the text is in the form of captions for the book’s many photographs. Monsters in the Movies is pure eye candy. This is an accurate description of John Landis’ coffee table book. The films represented here are included not because they are necessarily good or bad films, but only because of the monsters that appear in them.Īs for any movie monsters that are omitted, my only excuse is the finite number of photos my publisher would allow in the book…” –John Landis (Forward of Monsters in the Movies) Filmmaker John Landis poses with his book, “Monsters in the Movies.” This is a book with a lot of photographs of monsters in the movies. It is not some heavy tome on the meaning of violence in the cinema, or a ponderous examination of film theory.

Monsters in the Movies by John Landis