The House of Hammer #9 - General Book Distributors

June 1977 - The Creeping Unknown!

As I've mentioned here several times before, I never was a big fan of monster/film mags like Famous Monsters of Filmland. By the time I came around, horror and sci-fi films--and the merchandising inspired by them--were everywhere, so looking through a magazine talking about movies I (at the time) didn't really care about never appealed to me.

The House of Hammer (later to be known as Hammer's House of Horror) was the same kind of mag, so when I pick up one of these I'm seeing the material for the first time. When I saw this issue's wonderfully vivid cover (by Brian Lewis) I immediately added it to the pile of mags I was buying.

First up is the magazine's comic book segment, adapting the film The Quatermass Experiment in serialized chapters, written by Les Lilley and Ben Aldrich, featuring excellent art by cover artist Lewis:

The middle of the magazine is devoted to text-heavy articles, like a Book News section, movie news, and features like "In The Footsteps of Hitchcock: A Look At The Work of Brian De Palma", and film profiles like:

There's also profiles of Seizure, the Quatermass films, the King Kong films, a letters page, an article called "The Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue", the final chapter of the Quatermass adaptation, and a feature on horror movie merchandising collecting.

This issue ends with another comic book feature, this time with art by Jim Baikie, "Van Helsing's Terror Tales" :

At only three pages, this is a really great little feature; a perfect capper to the issue.

I bought this issue for only a couple of bucks, but there's so much fun stuff in it that I want to get more. Too bad this was never available in America at the time; I might have actually picked one or two of these up!