Unearthing the roots of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine: a paleontological perusal of the publications that made it possible.
FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND, the magazine originally created as a one-shot by publisher James Warren and writer/editor Forrest J Ackerman, first went on sale exactly sixty years ago, give or take a couple of weeks. If you already knew that - and if you're reading something called 'Astounding Horrors', there's a good chance you did - it's because FMOF subsequently had an impact on pop culture that's difficult to overestimate. For starters, if it wasn't for that magazine, the page you're looking at now probably wouldn't exist.
You'll probably also know the rest of the story. Cresting the wave of the 'Monster Fad' of 1957-58, the one-shot sold spectacularly well, and gave rise to a second issue. Many more followed, each new issue lapped up by tens of thousands of monster-loving kids. By the time its initial run ended 25 years and 191 issues later, FMOF had grown way beyond a mere fad and had gathered a huge fan community. Through the avuncular editorship of "Forry" Ackerman, it was FMOF that taught all those 'monster kids' that they were not alone; that there were others out there who shared the same parentally-scorned, oddball obsessions as they did. FMOF was a friend. As Peter Jackson wrote,
"He united a generation - more than one generation actually, and that's obvious because whenever you read anybody's tribute to Forry, you only have to substitute names and locations and it pretty much becomes your story."
Even beyond this, perhaps the most important legacy of Ackerman and FMOF was to help usher horror and science fiction into the mainstream, mainly through the many imaginative young minds it inspired. You already know some of their names. As well as Peter Jackson, there was Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Stephen King, James Cameron, Guillermo del Toro, Rick Baker, Joe Dante, John Landis, Tim Burton, Frank Darabont. And hundreds more.
FM ARCHEOLOGY
The story of FMOF's early history has been told many times, so instead let's dig a little deeper and uncover a few more strata in the bedrock beneath of the ‘World’s First Monster Magazine’. Deepest of these was the one that pretty much defined science fiction (or, to use its own term, 'scientifiction') as a genre: Amazing Stories. A couple of years before, Forry Ackerman had seen the Will Rogers fantasy One Glorious Day, and fallen in love with the movies; Amazing sparked a similar lifelong romance with science fiction on the printed page. Ackerman always insisted that when he was a child, magazines could talk. He recalled how, when he encountered the 1926 debut issue of Hugo Gernsback's title, “This one spoke to me. It said, ‘Take me home, little boy, you will love me’.” And so he did, and was smitten forever.
Ackerman soon immersed himself in the embryonic world of science fiction fandom. Sometime in the late 1930s, he became a 'Contributing Editor' to a science fiction fanzine named Imagination. Over the course of thirteen issues, this primitive mimeographed publication featured early works by his childhood friends Ray Harryhausen (who drew one of the covers) and Ray Bradbury. Other contributors included such future notables as Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson and DC Comics editor-in-chief Julius Schwarz. But Imagination was only one of several irons that Ackerman had in the (sci-)fire at the time, and had no direct influence on his later work. Arguably, the magazine that made the most significant impact, at least as far as FMOF's creators were concerned, was Playboy.
Hugh Hefner's opus, launched in 1953, caused a sensation and made a heap of money. To Ackerman, who was then working out of Hollywood as a literary agent, it meant a new market had opened up in which he could peddle his clients' (science) fiction. But to a young Assistant Advertising Manager at the Caloric Appliance Corporation of Topton, Pennsylvania named James Warren, it was nothing less than a revelation.
Warren, ambitious but stuck in a going-nowhere job, recognised Hefner's vision straight away. "He changed the cultural pattern of a nation", he later said in an interview for The Comic Book Artist, "and he did it so successfully on a shoestring, all by himself. He did it right out of his house, in his underwear, in his kitchen, and he revolutionised the market. I thought, if he can do that, I can do that too."
Warren quit Caloric and hustled together enough money to start a publishing venture of his own. The result was After Hours, a men's magazine which loosely followed the Playboy template but failed to scale the same heights. Although it gave Warren valuable experience in the industry, sales were poor in what was by then an overcrowded market, and a centrefold of a bare-breasted Bettie Page saw him brought before a judge on obscenity charges. The ensuing storm in a topless teacup, instigated by a publicity-hungry local D.A., left Warren financially disadvantaged and unfairly pictured in the local press as a porn-peddler. Yet while the flimsy court case quickly fizzled, so did After Hours; its fourth issue was its last. Luckily, four issues were more than enough to catch the eye of Forrest Ackerman.
Ackerman had first contacted Warren when the mag was still a going concern, intending to sell him some of his client's stories for publication, but it was Ackerman himself who made a bigger impression and the two men immediately hit it off. "I saw his writing and thought it had an interesting, offbeat style," Warren said. "The more I read it, the better it became". Ackerman contributed a monster-themed article to issue #4 titled Screamoscope Is Here! ("Hollywood combines Beauties and Beasts for Box Office Bonanzas...") which he illustrated with stills from his own collection, and which anticipated the light-hearted, pun-heavy tone of FMOF.
When After Hours folded, Warren's thoughts again turned to monsters. He'd noted the success of Universal's "Shock Theatre" TV syndication package, and saw an opportunity.
"The kids were cheering for the monster — the anti-hero — to win. This was something different; something new. A magazine version of the TV show, carefully crafted to spoof the monsters and yet treat them as "heroes" made sense to me. The adults wouldn't buy it, but the kids — those millions of Baby Boomers — would."
Ackerman had just the thing.
LES MONSTRES FANTASTIQUE
Forry presented Warren with a French magazine he'd come across called Cinema 57, which was entirely dedicated to 'Le Fantastique'. As it happened, Warren had come across it too, and the two men became enthused with the idea of printing the mag in an English-language edition. The plan died on the vine when they realised Cinema 57 was a scholarly film journal, devoted to horror and fantasy for that single issue only, and with a serious tone unlikely to appeal to the teen market Warren was looking for. Besides which, legal tangles over the reproduction of stills would prove prohibitively expensive. Again Ackerman provided a solution. He personally owned tens of thousands of stills, had spent more than thirty years as a horror and fantasy fan, and had dozens of film industry contacts. There was enough material in Ackerman's collection for twenty or thirty magazines. Why didn't he and Warren just create something of their own?
The two men got to work assembling a more kid-friendly concoction. They filled it with Ackerman's trademark puns and included a plug for 'Shock Theatre' designed to woo local TV networks nationwide, but their endeavours made no impression on distributors, who couldn't see the financial potential in Warren's idea. He pitched it to thirteen companies, and got thirteen rejections.
In the end, it was the Kable News Company who took the bait, thanks to the November 11th, 1957 issue of Life magazine. In it was a two-page 'Speaking of Pictures' pictorial titled 'Ghastly Look of a Film Fad', all about the slew of monster movies that had recently slithered out of Hollywood. The slightly bemused-sounding blurb included a pertinent sentence that must have gotten someone's attention: "Horror films as a group are the biggest profit makers in the business today", it asserted. Coming from the pages of Life magazine, that was enough to persuade Kable to climb off an overcrowded fence and take a gamble on Warren's left-field idea.
And this is where we came in; the initial print run of 200,000 copies was loosed upon the newsstands of an Eastern Seaboard suffering the worst blizzards in recent memory. Warren despaired, convinced that the buying public would be staying indoors and that his new venture was destined to sink without a trace just like After Hours. But miraculously, that first print run sold out, setting Warren and Ackerman on a path by now familiar to millions of rabid monster fans worldwide.
Famous Monsters of Filmland, the magazine to which this website and its creators owe such a great debt, has outlasted Warren's publishing empire and outlived its original editor. Currently in its third incarnation under the ownership of Philip Kim, FMOF #289 recently went on sale. Sixty years on, there's a satisfying irony to Warren's comments, when it first became clear to him that his ghastly publishing gamble had paid off. "I think we ought to strike while the iron's hot", he told Ackerman. "Do you think you can possibly squeeze out one more issue?"
Sources: James Warren Interview, Comic Book Artist #4; Tested, 'Remembering the Wonders in Famous Monsters Magazine'; 'Forry: The Life of Forrest J Ackerman', Deborah Painter
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