DOUBLE SHOCK HORROR! Horror/Sci-Fi/Fantasy Combos in British Cinemas 1958-1970 Q & A with author Barry Atkinson
This is a Hard Cover, Paperback and eBook about the horror/sci-fi/fantasy double programs that proliferated in British cinemas throughout the 1950s and 1960s, providing audiences with a vast array of cinematic delights on a weekly basis, as will be seen from the author’s never-ending trips to various cinemas in search of all things of a fantastical nature. In those days, the feature film as a form of mass entertainment reigned supreme over all others, the British censor’s office dictating, by means of strict film classification, who could see what and when, which presented a real barrier to those underage kids wishing to view adult material—and most movies of the author’s chosen genre were classified “X” Adults Only. It was a heady period for the enthusiast and one which will never again be repeated. Barry Atkinson’s repeated excursions from one cinema to another to take them all in, sometimes as much as four outings in the space of a week, will make many diehard buffs wish that those halcyon times would return!
Question #1: What was the inspiration behind your book?
Answer: I had already written on this topic in You’re Not Old Enough Son, published by Midnight Marquee Press in 2006, but because of the book’s length had only sketched in my personal visits to scores of cinemas, leaving out a great deal of material along the way. But when Bryan Senn’s excellent and informative Twice the Thrills! Twice the Spills! (McFarland, 2019) came out, I thought, hmm, I’ve attended nearly twice the number of horror double bills that figure in Senn’s tome; maybe I could document all the countless horror double attractions I caught at the cinema in far more detail than in You’re Not Old Enough Son. After all, this was both a particularly pleasurable and incredibly rewarding part of my juvenile years and I felt that fans of all ages, and especially the post-war Baby Boomer generation, might want to read about what it was like for a movie nut in England all those years ago, with tons of cinematic treats on offer week after week, year after year. Plus, without getting above myself, the book could be viewed by some as a social document of sorts, detailing a social era when “going to the pictures” was paramount to family life and played a major role, far more so than television which was, in the United Kingdom at least, still in its infancy during the 1950s. Having put the idea to Gary Svehla, MM’s publisher, he swiftly agreed: Gary’s a big admirer of these type of pictures, or “golden oldies,” and another hefty volume on the subject was right up his street.
Question #2: When did you first start writing the book?
Answer: In September 2023. Senn’s volume comprises 147 officially sanctioned horror/fantasy/science fiction double presentations released in the States over a 20-year period. But in England, most of the 268 double bills I sat through over a 13-year period were not classed as “officially sanctioned” at all but put together by enterprising independent picture houses intent on making a quick profit—and double horror bills were very profitable, and very popular, indeed. Yes, the Hammer pairings and American International duos, among others, could be classed as such, but titles like It! The Terror from Beyond Space, House on Haunted Hill, The Monster that Challenged the World, 20 Million Miles to Earth, Revenge of the Creature, The Black Sleep, Day the World Ended, The Deadly Mantis, Frankenstein 1970, Rodan, Fiend Without a Face and The Werewolf shared the bill with all manner of partners, including each other! From notes, diaries, scraps of paper, old newspaper cuttings and plumbing the depths of my very good memory, I started to put finger to keyboard in September but halted in December due to losing, within the space of three days, two of our beloved Greek cats at the beginning of the month which knocked me for six. In fact, I was ready to give up on the project but resumed work in February 2024, completing the manuscript in December of that year. If I get my teeth into a subject, I can hit my stride and write pretty quickly, and this volume I fairly sped through. Gary absolutely loved the finished article but then sold his business to BearManor Media some months later. Ben took up the reins, producing a sizeable tome, one which I envisaged in my mind all along as being the perfect volume of the content matter it represents and a book of which I am proud of.
Question #3: What are your thoughts on the book’s sale potential?
Answer: Well, we are dealing with a niche market here, but I reckon it will be a “slow burner,” selling well over a given period of time. I’ve already spotted it among the “film studies” section of a couple of major booksellers which is perhaps where it belongs. Baby Boomers will hopefully appreciate what’s on offer while younger buffs, such as my cinema-mad grandson, will maybe pick up on the 628-page opus and realize what they’ve been missing all these years!
Question #4: I’ve seen that you’ve got a fair number of titles under your belt. When did your passion for writing begin?
Answer: Many many years ago! I still possess my Scholar’s Reports from July 1955 and July 1957 which state that “Barry’s composition is good … he can be imaginative and fluent.” At college in the early ’60s, I was always top of the class in composition. I distinctly remember my English teacher, Mr. Smith, commenting that “Atkinson tells a good story rather well apart from his obsession with science fiction,” a foretaste of things to come, so I must have had some inherent talent in this field. In 1963, Brooke Bond, a well-known beverage company, sponsored an essay writing competition in West Cornwall’s Secondary Schools and I came second with a tale concerning a resurrected werewolf on the prowl in a Cornish village. Later, in 1981, I began submitting numerous articles to The Plymouth Mineral and Mining Club relating to my frequent (and quite dangerous) explorations around derelict West Country mines, both above and below ground, industrial archaeology being one of my main passions. It was this specific hobby that sowed the seeds in me to perhaps produce a basic guide on abandoned Cornish and Devon mine sites, and what remained to be seen at surface, a small volume that might appeal to the general public.
Question #5: Any early successes?
Answer: Yes. Bashed out on an old Olivetti typewriter over eight months (anyone remember Tipp-ex and carbon paper?), the manuscript entitled Mining Sites in Cornwall and South West Devon was published by Dyllansow Truran in 1988 and sold out its initial run of a thousand in a three weeks, going on to sell thousands more, as did the follow-up, Mining Sites in Cornwall Volume 2, which came out in 1994. Len Truran, the proprietor, wanted me to do a third but I had a completely different project on the boil based on my exploits around the cinema and films and politely turned the offer down.
Question #6. What was the next stage in your writing career?
Answer: In 1988, after the first mining volume was issued, I had in mind a book chronicling my childhood/teenage adventures throughout the 1950s/1960s in trying to see everything on offer to adults, not children, at the cinema, focusing on horror, science fiction and fantasy pictures. Over the years, I had kept check-lists of cinema outings and old film magazines, including the infamous Famous Monsters of Filmland, and was partial to analysing movies, i.e. direction, acting, special effects, script and music. I therefore reckoned I had a story to tell. Not so my then partner, her dismissive comment being: “Who is going to read a book about you going to the pictures?” End of project! But with a new partner from 1990 onwards, a plan of action began to take shape around 2000 and I finally started work on it in 2003; 95% of the manuscript had been completed by October 2004. After submitting the first four chapters with a covering letter to eight publishers and receiving two “maybe laters,” two outright rejections and three non-responses, Midnight Marquee Press took up the options to publish You’re Not Old Enough Son in January 2005, the book coming out in September 2006. I believe it was quite a success, both critically and commercially.
Question #7: What came after?
Answer: Nothing at first. I was living in Crete from early 2007 and had no plans to write anything, being tied up with the year-long construction of our Greek villa. Gary was asking for film reviews from his authors for future MM journals and mentioned “try something else” to me, so I rattled off You Are Old Enough Son in double-quick time (it was published in 2011). Greek television used to screen a lot of straight-to-DVD/TV/low-budget independent horror efforts: I became intrigued and thought, “Well, these are at least different to the norm,” so Indie Horrors! was born, again pumped out in 10 months and published in 2012, by which time I was back in the U.K. Gary was still open to book suggestions and we had a good working relationship going, so I embarked on a frenetic 13 years of film writing: Atomic Age Cinema (2014) which became a Rondo award nominee in 2015; Six-Gun Law volumes 1, 2 and 3 (2015, 2018, 2021); Heroes Never Die! (2017); Under Ten Million? Anything’s Possible! (2023); and Double Shock Horror! which is now out on BearManor Media. Sandwiched in between all these were over 50 movie reviews which found themselves in various MM magazines and compendiums and an autobiography, Off Out to the Woods, charting my childhood adventures (and misdeeds!) in the 1950s. Published by Novum/united p.c. in 2016, this is now out of print. I also self-published Plaka Cat in 2021 which concerned me and my wife’s unique years spent in Crete and how the stray feline population converging on our villa drastically changed our lives for the better and forced us to re-evaluate the bad old world we now inhabit.
Question #8: Wow! That’s some output. Surely, you must have a favorite?
Answer: That’s a tough one. I suppose my crowning achievement, if you could term it that, is Heroes Never Die! which was an in-depth analysis of the Italian Peplum genre from 1950 to 1967. Peplum productions had never really received the full coverage they deserved and it took me a very exhausting 19 months to write, morning, noon and night, working from scratch because of the dearth of material on obscure Italian sword and sandal pictures, both in film literature and DVD-wise. The overall response was terrific, apart from a couple of online negative comments which unfortunately go with the territory, and, at present, remains the “Bible” on the subject. I actually think that my individual style reached a peak in the three Six-Gun Law Western volumes which possess a nice sense of fluidity in the prose. But are they my favorites? Perhaps not. The two books that I most delve into, to indulge myself and derive pleasure from, are Under Ten Million? (over 600 indie movies reviewed; and Sue Svehla’s monster-laden interior layout is fantastic) and Double Shock Horror! for the nostalgic kick it gives me, the 1950s and 1960s unsurpassed, in my opinion, for their feature films of all genres and the way they were exhibited to the picture-crazy British public, a fabulous period of cinemagoing which I was fortunate enough to live through.
Question #9: Your books mainly concentrate on the oldies. Does that mean you have little regard for the modern crop of horror, fantasy and science fiction product?
Answer: I must admit, I honestly don’t enjoy them as much, for various reasons. Too long, poor musical soundtracks, uneven audio (more often than not, you can barely hear what the actors are saying), actors you can’t identify with and overblown CGI effects. I can regularly pull out a classic such as the early Hammers, Universal’s monster movies of the ’50s, the Frankenstein series dating back to the 1930s and Continental horror, not to mention a host of low-budget indie features, and lap them up time and time again. But modern stuff like the new Nosferatu and Mummy remakes? No. Having said that, some do hit the mark, such as the Japanese Godzilla’s, 2011’s The Thing, 2025’s The Gorge and Scandinavian efforts like Viking Wolf, Troll and Hatching. And it is a fact that a lot of low-budget indie genre films encapsulate the values of those gems turned out in the past—check out great titles like The Ritual, The Shrine, Redwood, Quarries and Confined and you’ll see what I mean. However, I still to this day get as much of a buzz out of watching The Quatermass Experiment, Tarantula, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, House of Wax and their ilk as I did when I first caught them at the cinema over 60 years ago. They’ve got true lasting power, but then, I’m a fully paid-up member of the rapidly diminishing Baby Boomer club and can appreciate them for what they are, works of art produced with panache on, by today’s standards, low-to-medium budgets.
Question #10: Anything else in the pipeline?
Answer: No, not really. I think I’ve contributed enough to the world of horror film literature in one form or another. However, I do have a stack of movie reviews that were never used by Midnight Marquee and if Ben’s ideas for a horror journal come to fruition, you never know!