Whose Vault Is It?

Whose Vault Is It?

11/07/2006

Topping, Keith. A Vault of Horror: A Book of 80 Great British Horror Movies From 1956-1974. Tolworth, Surrey: Telos, 2004. 427 p.

If you’re a movie fan, then you probably share one of my bad habits: you find yourself habitually getting sidetracked whenever you are doing research on the internet, ending up at The Internet Movie Database. After all, it isn’t often that you run across just about every bit of information you could ask for about any given film. You want to know whether or not it’s true that a band member of Live has a cameo in Fight Club, or whether The Red Hot Chili Peppers are the castrating gang at the end of The Doom Generation, or how many “Sopranos” could be found in The Basketball Diaries—you can find that tidbit of information. You want to know whether or not you can see strings holding up spaceships in your favorite B-flicks like Attack of the 50 Foot Woman and Plan 9 From Outer Space, or even in the more professional The War of the Worlds (1953)—you can find out. In fact, no factoid is too trivial.

Take what the IMDB does for movies via the internet, and trade it for a print publication, and you have the likes of Keith Topping’s A Vault of Horror. This is the kind of book that makes a serious academic wince when he or she takes it off of a library shelf, but which will ultimately enthrall that same individual as he or she gets sucked into some of the more fun sections, such as “You Don’t See Many of Those Today” (which describes various ephemera associated with a given flick) or “Outrageous Methods of Dispatch” (which deals with most horror fans favorite part of any movie—the “notably gruesome death scenes” as Topping terms it).

And this collection of thoughts and little known facts about eighty horror movies is fun, there is no doubt about it. Topping includes well known titles such as Dracula, Village of the Damned, The Haunting, and The Wicker Man, but he accompanies these with some little known gems, like Quartermass and the Pit, Dr. Phibes Rides Again, and Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter. Of course, no kitschy book would be complete without totally forgettable flicks, and there are more than a fair share of those types of titles here as well. What will perhaps turn off readers is the apparent arbitrariness with which movies seem to have been chosen for inclusion. But each to his own. After all, the title of Topping’s tome is not The Vault of Horror, but rather A Vault of Horror, which implies that there are, and will be, other vaults opened in the near future.

The typical entry contains the following information: movie title, time, format (color versus black and white, for example), producer, writer, director, a full cast listing, the tagline, a plot summary, thematic concerns, trivia (such as sinister animals, ephemera, “outrageous methods of dispatch,” etc.), alternate versions, quotes, reviews, and so forth. The listings also include other films for which the principals are known, and the supposed story behind the movie’s creation. Take for example the entry on a little know but brilliant movie, Quartermass and the Pit. Under Outrageous Methods of Dispatch Topping claims that the film contains science fiction’s first theatrical alien autopsy, and he alerts readers to the fact that in the United States, the film was released as Five Million Years to Earth, which was the title I remember having seen the film under.

Topping also includes an index of cast and crews, which would be helpful to many scholars if the text were more comprehensive. However, since the selections are, for want of a better word, selective, it is difficult to see how any serious research could be done using The Vault of Horror. It would no doubt have to be supplemented with other horror filmographies, as well as by the IMDB. In fact, one might question why anyone would need Topping’s book given the existence of the IMDB. Unfortunately, that is not a question that I can answer.

In his review for The Alien Online (www.thealienonline.net), M. J. Simpson summarizes the main problem with a text of this type, with terms and phrases such as “curious” and “completely random” when referring to Topping’s choice of credits to include.¹ To put it bluntly, the major limitation (note I do not call this a weakness, as a weakness, in bibliographic review terms, is something the bibliographer did not produce intentionally) of A Vault of Horror is that it will seem random in all of its choices, and thus will have an extremely limited appeal. That being said, I believe it would be unfair then to not judge the book on its own terms—that is, whether or not it serves well the reading population for which it would be intended.

The real question then becomes that of Topping’s vault to the casual horror fan. In that respect, I would disagree with Simpson in his negating the importance of certain kinds of trivia and factoids where fans are concerned. Although he does make an excellent point of noting that thematic and plot oriented information would be more helpful to certain readers, he does not see this vault through the eyes of those who would find the question of “who played the fourth demon from the right” interesting, possibly even fascinating. I suppose the best way to sum up A Vault of Horror’s appeal would be to overstate the painfully obvious—it will appeal to the types of readers who desire the information it contains. With a text that has so many author imposed limitations, there is very little else one can say in the terms of a recommendation.

¹Simpson also rightfully takes to task the incredibly “busy” look of the pages in the text, which is a result of curious choices for font and format. Readers with weak eyesight had best beware, as peering too closely into this vault would cause extreme eyestrain.