http://www.davidcronenberg.de/filmthreatcronen.html

So yeah. The horror zine scene. First off, obviously, John Szpunar did an incredible job of getting Xerox Ferox together. It’s a real obsessive work of art and labor of love, and the affection for, and attention to, the material documented shows through in every page. An amazing book. I loved your memories of exploring the fringes of the horror scene; brought back teenage memories of my own, of going through to Edinburgh from my old home town of Falkirk age 17 and discovering mags like Film Threat, which had an on-set visit to the Naked Lunch movie. Wonder if that is online anywhere; FT just went belly-up recently. Next time I’m back in Falkirk I will see if I can scan my copy; I recall it as being pretty entertaining, with Peter Weller and the writer being at a strip club at lunchtime and Weller saying to the writer, as naked women drift by, “I guess this really IS a naked lunch.”

You talk about the internet making it too easy to dig for things, or to write thoughts up on blogs. I would agree with this. I was sent a couple of years ago a scan of a one-off zine I did, Viscera View, from 1989, and I was surprised at the decent quality of the writing in it, with in-depth articles about obscure Lucio Fulci films and such, with esoteric knowledge that would easily rival any contemporary documentation. This was all just derived from getting zines from around the country, and meeting like-minded people and swapping films (illegally, with possible fines or imprisonment as punishment, like something out of Soviet Russia or something) and notes about said films.

It surprised me to see how much info was available before the net, through zines like Paul Mallinson’s excellent Sludgefeast (I was always more into regional zines, being able to relate to the irreverent writers more, and never read stuff like Shock Xpress), and pleased me too, to have been part of such a vibrant and valuable group of cinematic outlaws (at least in the UK, that is) and weirdos and aficionados during the tape-trading days.

However, I must say, there is nothing like the base visceral immediacy of writing a review or article and having it go up online very soon afterwards, instead of having to do your own zine or send it off to somebody who might put out their own zine months or years later, if at all, for personal or idiosyncratic reasons. It’s a definite plus point, and one I have well taken advantage of. If anybody cares to read a selection of my work, they can do so at: http://www.facebook.com/raewrites.

You draw some interesting parallels between the WSB and horror zine scenes. To be honest, I don’t recall much, if any, crossover, back then; my own WSB interest is pretty anomalous in that sense and scene, really. The horror zine scene was a mostly hetero-oriented crowd, having fun documenting the next cheesy sleazy trash anti-epic, and homo-oriented material was not talked about much, if at all. The UK zines I read and wrote for, including my own, were not coming out of cosmopolitan metropolises, they were coming out of English and Scottish suburbs, written by working-or-lower-middle-class people, and their living and viewing environments were often, sadly, not homosexual friendly. So gay material just wasn’t on the radar of most people although, ironically, the guy who gave me a list of uncut tapes at Shock Around the Clock 2 (a horror fest run by the Shock Xpress guys) was gay. Horror fans were not homophobic; homosexuality was just not on their radar, gaydar, whatever.

As you point out, of course there is a crossover between Cronenberg and the horror zine scene. He was/is a big horror fan fave, at least with his early Burroughs-and-Ballard-influenced work. Horror fans tend to have one or two fave directors, from whatever country, and stick with that person through their whole career. George A Romero was mine (I was a zombie in Land of the Dead), Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento were a friend’s.

When you talk about the entire horror zine world being one of nostalgia, well, for printed zines I guess that is pretty much true. But it wasn’t at the time, absolutely not. At the time horror fans from round the world (mainly America and Europe, in my own limited experience) would try and be the first to get the new Pete Jackson or Dario Argento or whoever film and be the first to write about it in their zine. There was a definite cool factor in being the first to review a film, so horror and underground film fans (there were a few people, like myself, into underground films, like the aforementioned Paul Mallinson, but most horror fans were into just horror films, really) were among the most cutting-edge film fans in the world.

Writing about now-defunct horror zines is nostalgia; the zines themselves were not, and far from it. A lot of the contemporary horror fan-scene conversation is pretty retro, though, and tedious with it, because they are still obsessing about films from decades ago – Cannibal Holocaust, The Grim Reaper, Jesus Franco anti-epics, whatever – that had been discussed to death by the early 90s. So the new crop of horror fans, going online to post long, poorly-thought-out videos of themselves talking crap about old, shit films, doesn’t appeal to me, personally. It’s all been done before and, to me, a lot of the new films – I barely watch any anymore – just seem like tired retreads of better films that came before them. So the new horror scene is, ironically, nostalgia, a lot of the time, even if they’re discussing ostensibly contemporary films.

Now. As for my own WSB obsession. Yes, as you point out, in some ways WSB was a pulp writer. Naked Lunch, my own fave book of his, is like kitsch pulp horror sci-fi, drawing from a variety of sources, and this is very cut-and-paste zinelike. Coming from a horror scene that loved extreme films, I always loved the extremity of Burroughs’s vision, and that of JG Ballard, another small-mags crossover writer. That was what resonated with Burroughs for me; the sick sense of humor, extreme vision, and general all-round madness. It fit very well into the whole horror-cum-underground thing, at least to me; you won’t find many straight WSB aficionados from Falkirk! Smiling here.

So anyway, just a few thoughts. Excellent piece as ever, Jed. Wish I had met you at some horror fest in the UK in the late 80s/early 90s. We would have had many beers and laughs. There’s always the future…

Graham.