Rock ‘n’ Roll Monsters: The American International Story is a 2016 book by Bruce G Hallenbeck (The Amicus Anthology; The Hammer Frankenstein; The Hammer Vampire), published by British-based Hemlock Books.
In the early 1950s, the traditional American film industry was facing a crisis due to one thing: television. Two men from totally different backgrounds pooled their talents and tapped into the burgeoning ‘teenage’ market, and American International Pictures was born.
Over the next 25 years, ‘AIP’ would turn out genre films of every kind, from sci-fi and horror to ‘beach party’ and Blaxploitation. Some of its titles have since become legendary – I Was a Teenage Werewolf, Horrors of the Black Museum, The Wild Angels – but the company also produced prestige pictures like Wuthering Heights and box-office bonanzas such as Love at First Bite and The Amityville Horror.
Rock ‘n’ Roll Monsters is the story of how AIP went from a cornball purveyor of drive-in double-features filled with monsters and mayhem to a major force in films whose ‘fast and furious’ business model was copied and eventually adopted by the Hollywood mainstream…
Paperback, 298 pages, fully illustrated throughout, eight pages in colour.
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