"Take Me Home...."

“In those days magazines spoke, and that one said,

“take me home little boy, you will love me!”- Forrest J Ackerman describing “Amazing Stories”.

Just as pulp magazines in the 1930s and 40s attracted the eye through colourful, often lurid and sometimes racy, front covers, so Forrest J Ackerman’s FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND seduced a whole generation of young readers instantly drawn to the fabulous cover artwork portraying Dracula,  the Phantom of the Opera, Quasimodo, Mr Hyde and the Frankenstein monster - all the film monsters we had ever heard about from our parents, feature-creatures who indeed seemed to mutter, “take me home little boy, you will love me…”

And so I did, having paid my two shillings and six pence, - from the (news) papershop which I find is still a newsagent, on St Edmund Street, just around the corner from Weymouth harbour. And as happened to so many young boys, I was hooked - the horror and monster film would from here on be my “genre” and I, like so many others would for ever after be able to recall “the exact moment they first set eyes on Famous Monsters”.

For me it was in the summer of 1965, the issue was no 33 and I was just twelve years old. How surprised a little later, must my school teachers have been to discover that a whole magazine existed in celebration of the horror movies of an earlier generation, - when I turned up to class with a stack of FMs in order to illustrate my “show & tell” entitled, “Universal Monsters”! - Hooked? - It was for life!



“Once upon a time there was just me collecting things…”
Forrest J Ackerman 

 

Forrest J Ackerman (1916-2008), the boy who never grew up,

(known to his readers as the Ackermonster, "the original geek, the nerd zero, from which every sci-fi or monster fan sprang fully deformed..."), was an American collector of science fiction and fantasy books and movie memorabilia. He was, for over seven decades, one of science fiction's staunchest spokesmen and promoters, and a key figure in the wider cultural perception of science fiction as a literary, art and film genre. Famously he coined the genre nickname "sci-fi". About the world’s first such magazine, monster magazine blogger Mike Scott has written; "The idea for Famous Monsters of Filmland was born during a late 1957 business meeting between James Warren and Forrest J Ackerman. Ackerman had been selling a few articles to Warren for his girly mag After Hours and brought along an issue of the French journal Cinema 57 (no. 20, a history of fantastic cinema), that he picked up on a recent trip to Europe. Warren had been looking for an idea for a one-shot mag and imagined the French tome, translated into English, would fit the bill nicely." Aware of the recent resurgence in popularity of the old horror films with kids across the USA (via the Screen Gems TV package "Shock"), Warren decided, continues Scott, "to gear the mag to young readers, using plenty of humour to leaven the horror (as the TV "horror hosts" were doing). Forry Ackerman was quite up to the challenge and was chosen to be the editor and principle writer (and supplier of stills from his vast collection). Getting backing and a distributor proved to be a little more difficult, but a deal with Kable News was struck and the mag went out to the newsstands in Feb. of 1958 and was a sell out, requiring a second printing to be done." 

Thus was born the first true "monster magazine" and the Warren Publishing empire (which included Spacemen, Famous Westerns of Filmland, Screen Thrills Illustrated, Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella and other titles). Many imitators would follow, but few would match the success of FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND.

Journalist Robert Greenberger maintains, “Famous Monsters of Filmland, in many ways, shaped the movies we are watching today. The likes of Steven Spielberg, John Landis, Peter Jackson and George Lucas were all fans of the magazines in the days before there were even books on the subject of movie monsters and filmmaking.”

"He's never given up being the boy of all time." - Ray Bradbury on Forrest J Ackerman