These two right here for me. While technically they're one book, the one on the right being an updated version that takes in horror films from 1990 - 2010. Horror isn't my favourite genre (it's up there though) but it's the one I know most about because of this book.
The version on the left blew my mind as a teenager. Our school library had a copy and on more than one occasion I snuck it home to devour it. In the 80's and early 90's the only horror movies you'd see on TV were from Hammer studios or the occasional Friday the 13th. Imagine going from them to reading about the horror movies coming Italy, Germany, Mexico, the southern states of the US, from the imaginations of Andy Warhol, Lucio Fulci, Ruggero Deodato, Wes Craven and so many more. Picture the buzz you'd get reading about films like Prisoner Of The Cannibal God, Thundercrack, Blue Sunshine and Q, The Winged Serpent when you've never seen anything spicier than Dracula Has Risen From The Grave. Because of reading this book I knew all about Dawn Of The Dead and The Last House On The Left long before I ever got to see them. I'd heard of actors like Udo Kier and Divine and Giovanni Lombardo Radice a full decade before I got to see the movies that made them infamous, respectively Flesh For Frankenstein, Pink Flamingoes & Cannibal Ferox. It was the kind of read that helped sow a love of movies in you that would stay for a lifetime.
If you ever come across a secondhand dog eared copy of the early edition of this book with films sporadically highlighted in luminous yellow marker throughout let me know.
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