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Institutionalised as a child for a gruesome double murder and having undergone experimental psychiatric treatment into adulthood, George Tatum is finally released into society... only to kill again. Of all the slasher films to appear in the 1980s, none were as brutal or would elicit as much controversy as Romano Scavolini''s Nightmare. From round-the-clock screenings in New York City to becoming a popular VHS rental, the film was quickly championed by gorehounds thirsting for onscreen blood while alienating many others. Onscreen carnage was only the beginning. Critics found the film offensive and its moral tone ambiguous. The gruesome special effects were subject to fierce debate. The UK distributor served a prison sentence for releasing the film uncut, provocatively retitled as Nightmares in a Damaged Brain. It became one of the most notorious of the so-called ''video nasties''. Author Nick Cato first experienced Nightmare as part of a double feature in 1983. He is not alone in considering it one of the most intense horror films of all time. He is alone in having spent over forty years amassing material on the film, sitting through countless reviews (mostly negative) and magazine articles, attending dozens of theatrical screenings, and conducting many interviews. This book is the result. Dark Dreams - a fan obsessed. Nightmare - a slasher film that refuses to die.

Robert Guffey''s Hollywood Haunts the World: An Investigation into the Cinema of Occulted Taboos covers 100 years of cinematic history, ranging from Victor Sjostrom''s The Phantom Carriage in 1921 to Guillermo del Toro''s Nightmare Alley in 2021. Over nine chapters, Guffey deconstructs the most powerful taboos of the twentieth century (and the initial decades of the twenty-first century) by analyzing how disturbing and transgressive ideas involving Theosophy, Gnosticism, Freemasonry, Darwinian Evolution, Surrealism, Freudian and Jungian psychology, race relations, paranoia, UFOs, xenophobia, political conspiracies, the JFK assassination, virtual reality, and alternate dimensions have been reflected in popular films in America and worldwide. Films and TV shows that come under scrutiny include Guillermo del Toro''s Nightmare Alley, Larry Wade Carell''s Girl Next, Matt Shakman''s WandaVision, Anthony and Joe Russo''s Avengers: Infinity War, Scott Derrickson''s Dr. Strange, Steven Spielberg''s Ready Player One, Jennifer Kent''s The Babadook, Christopher Nolan''s Inception, Stanley Kubrick''s Eyes Wide Shut, Vince Gilligan''s Breaking Bad, Oliver Stone''s JFK, Mark Frost and David Lynch''s Twin Peaks, John Carpenter''s They Live, Alan Pakula''s The Parallax View, John Frankenheimer''s The Manchurian Candidate, Jack Arnold''s It Came from Outer Space, Edgar G. Ulmer''s The Man from Planet X, Robert Florey''s Murders in the Rue Morgue, Buster Keaton''s Sherlock Jr., Victor Sjostrom''s The Phantom Carriage, and more.

IN THE EARLY 80s, New York City''s Gansevoort Meatpacking District, a small irregular patch of the West Village, was a wild confluence of meat market workers, gay men hitting The Mineshaft or The Anvil, transgender sex workers, homeless huddled around burn barrels, New Jersey mafiosos, veterans of three wars, heroes of the French Resistance, and Holocaust survivors. Michael Backus was newly arrived to the city when he began working at Adolf Kusy Meats in 1982, a young man fresh out of college who had never imagined himself in any city, much less New York. But he was going to be a fiction writer and while ignorant of what that might actually entail, understood that writers lived in New York.