Denis Gifford has been gone just over eight  years now but I think of him every day – I have a copy of his Studio Vista/Dutton “pictureback” SCIENCE FICTION FILM in my bathroom.  I don’t intend that as a slight, as I’d hardly keep anything but a good book in my loo and its place there (alongside Edgar Wallace’s DARK EYES OF LONDON and Alan Jones PROFONDO ARGENTO ) is in and of itself the highest praise.  I picked up my copy of this long out-of-print 1971 paperbacka year or so ago for $2 -  two bits cheaper than its cover price, due to degraded condition but those Studio Vista books are nothing if not sturdy.  Printed on thick, glossy paper and (as their designation of “pictureback” promises) full of illustrations, they hold up and all of mine have withstood nearly forty years of time and the elements.  One of the first movie books I ever owned was Gifford’s coffee table-sized A PICTORIAL HISTORY OF HORROR MOVIES (Hamlyn Publishing Group, 1973), a gift on my twelfth birthday.  Around the same time I was given a copy of his KARLOFF: THE MAN, THE MONSTER, THE MOVIES (Curtis Books), a critical filmography of Boris Karloff’s movies with synopses and lists of his TV and stage appearances.  An inexpensive paperback, I literally read this one to pieces and its pages now hang by a slender thread; the physical act of reading it is like trying to hold soup.  The books of Denis Gifford were seminal under-the-covers reading for this future Movie Morlock and it has slowly dawned on me, after only thirty-five years of reading his byline, how indebted I am to him.

Denis Gifford, by day a benign, bespectacled Dr. Jekyll who draws comics for kiddies, is by night a Mr Hyde of the horror movie, creeping into his crypt of sinister souvenirs to carefully catalogue the monsters from the mummies, the warlocks from the werewolves, the amazing colossal men from the incredible shrinking men, in his crack-brained crusade to create order and see history in the seventy-seven-year saga of cinematic nightmares.

So begins Gifford’s dust jacket bio for A PICTORIAL HISTORY OF HORROR MOVIES, which is accompanied by the photo above.  Gifford seemed all right to me – a hip nerd before we ever knew of such a classification.  About the man I knew almost nothing and only in the years since his death, on May 18, 2000, at the age of 72, have I learned anything about him at all: that he was a boy cartoonist, that his first cartoons were published he was only 14 years old, that he once performed in a comic duo with British comedian Bob Monkhouse (whom he had met at Dulwich College), that he wrote for radio and television (he created the popular SOUNDS FAMILIAR and LOOKS FAMILIAR quiz shows) and wrote about radio and television in addition to comics and films, that he banged out an unproduced CARRY ON… script and that – despite his prolific output of fifty-some books on many subjects (including THE BRITISH FILM CATALOGUE, which took twenty years to compile) and comics regularly published in The London Evening News, The Empire State News and The Sunday Despatch - he sustained himself by writing newspaper obituaries for The Independent and The Guardian. He phoned in his last assignment on the day he died.  Gifford was married for a time to Angela Kalagias, whom he had met while employed by Pathe Films, and the couple had a daughter, Pandora Jane, to whom Gifford dedicated all his books (all the ones I have, anyway) with obvious pride and affection.

I started with Gifford and I enjoy going back to him.  He was not only a great researcher and historian but he was – and remains to this day – a highly readable writer who struck the perfect balance of reverence and wit.  Here’s a passage that I go back to time and time again, dedicated to the Universal monster movies of the 1930s and 40s:

Universal Europe: where the moors of Llanwelly subbed for the plains of Vasaria, where villagers crossed themselves in cockney or ‘country’ before lighting their flaming torches and proceeding up the Borgo Pass.  The settings were interchangeable.  This was the secret of the Universal universe.  It gave the great films a continuity that was comforting to come back to, whatever the horror that walked about.  Familiar faces, familiar places: a sort of security in a world of fear.

How absolutely on the money he was about the comfort and security of classic horror.  I came to the same conclusions when I was a shy and unhappy “tweener” and it was a wonderful affirmation to see my thoughts validated in print.  I got that same kind of comfort from Gifford’s collected works, which continue to inspire and inform me four decades later.  I never knew Denis Gifford but I miss the man.  I’m the age now that he was when I discovered him and I know what it’s like to give over a great portion of your life to a passion that can’t pay a living. When you look at someone’s birth and death dates bracketed after their name, the tendency is to feel a little sorry for them, that their lives are finite, finished, a closed book.  How arrogant that is and how wrong.  I’m a bit late for this to be a proper eulogy but what a life Denis Gifford lived… a Londoner by birth (at the end of the era of silent movies and the birth of sound), he was evacuated ahead of the Blitz but returned and remained to pursue several passions at once and be an expert at all of them, to write and write well and publish and publish often.  (Gifford’s unfinished/unpublished works, I’m told, would fill a small warehouse… and among those manuscripts a book on the films of Edgar Wallace.)  He served his country in the Royal Air Force toward the end of the war, he fell in love, he fathered a child he clearly adored, and he had the respect of his many peers and colleagues… some for whom he had the unhappy job of writing an obituary and others who had the unhappy job of writing his.  “Thus does life tie itself neatly together,” Denis Gifford wrote in 1997, upon the death of his old writing partner Tony Hawes.  “Provided you live long enough.”

Eight years after his death, Denis Gifford is not a closed book.  Not in my house.  I keep cracking him because it seems I can’t get by without him.  He’s still teaching and I’m still learning.  If you love comics, if you love the silents, if you love science fiction and horror movies and don’t know Denis Gifford, then I suggest you do something about that.  You really don’t know what you’re missing.