Cult Movies Press is owned and operated by Linda & Frank Dello Stritto. CMP publishes quality hard-cover books of Frank’s writings on classic horror films. Our books to date are:

Three non-fiction books:

VAMPIRE OVER LONDON
Bela Lugosi in Britain
(co-authored with Andi Brooks)

A QUAINT & CURIOUS VOLUME OF FORGOTTEN LORE
The Mythology & History of Classic Horror Films

And four “historical novels” blending the “reel world” of the movies with the real world in which we live:

I SAW WHAT I SAW WHEN I SAW IT
Growing Up in the 1950s & 1960s with Television Reruns & Old Movies.

A WEREWOLF REMEMBERS
The Testament of Lawrence Stewart Talbot

CARL DENHAM’S GIANT MONSTERS

THE PASSION OF THE MUMMY

PATRON SAINTS OF THE LIVING DEAD

Frank is a two-time Rondo Award winner and a member of the Rondo’s Monster Kid Hall of Fame. On his induction to the Hall, the Rondo Committee issued the statement:

Many writers these days come up with genre “mash-ups,” where Tarzan, for example, meets Sherlock Holmes, but no one does it as brilliantly as Frank J. Dello Stritto. In three can’t-put-down novels, he has woven together the untold histories of various movie werewolves and wolf men, untangled the wanderings of Universal and Hammer’s mummies, and explored with Carl Denham the many lost worlds and giant monsters of the Pacific.

All this in addition to his trailblazing work on the real-life history of Bela Lugosi, shedding light on the unknown corners of classic horror history, and providing entertaining looks at the genre’s many totems and themes. Dello Stritto’s work always delivers, and he has changed horror scholarship for the better.

Frank is indeed a “monster kid” (aka, “monster boomer”), one of the post-World War II baby boomers raised when horror and monster movies of the 1930s and 1940s were rediscovered on television. His odyssey of discovering the old movies is described in his memoir, I SAW WHAT I SAW WHEN I SAW IT.

For old movies, Frank never quite grew up, and he has been writing and speaking of his favorite films for most of his life. His special “hero” is Dracula-portrayer Bela Lugosi. In the late 1990s, when he and Linda were living in Aberdeen, Scotland, he teamed with another Lugosi fan, Andi Brooks, to research an overlooked year in Lugosi’s life, when the actor sought a comeback in Britain in 1951. They found many people who had worked with Lugosi or saw him perform. Virtually none of them had ever spoken of their experiences with him. Andi and Frank intended a journal article, but so much new information with unearthed that the project became a full-length book, VAMPIRE OVER LONDON, now in its second edition.

While Frank researched input for his books, he always wrote magazine articles. Cult Movies Magazine had no restrictions on article lengths, and Frank’s more comprehensive pieces were published there. The articles delve into the sometimes subtle themes, ideas, and histories in the films that are easily overlooked. The essays are collected, with some original ones, in A QUAINT & CURIOUS VOLUME OF FORGOTTEN LORE.

Frank’s three non-fiction books are collected in a boxed set, the CULT MOVIES PRESS HORROR TRILOGY, which one reviewer calls “the tri-angulated crossfire of movie fandom: history, analysis and memoir.”

After completing the trilogy, Frank returned to his “first love”—not an investigation of the making of the movies or their themes, but the characters in them. As a boy, whenever a movie ended, he pondered about the lives of the characters before the story started and after it ended. And—for characters who appeared in multiple films—about their lives between the movie plots.

The films don’t tell us that, so Frank filled in the blanks with A WEREWOLF REMEMBERS (in which the lost journals of Lawrence Talbot, the Wolf Man, are discovered), CARL DENHAM’S GIANT MONSTERS (the aged captor of King Kong, and fugitive from the lawsuits and indictments that followed Kong’s rampage through Manhattan is discovered on a small Indonesian island), THE PASSION OF THE MUMMY (the spark of life continues in dormant Kharis, on display in a museum,  and his mind still holds a secret that the Cult of Karnak-Arkham must learn) and PATRON SAINT OF THE LIVING DEAD (a young man searches for a lost ancestor – a sorcerer/scientist who created zombies).

A  fifth novel, DON’T LET SATAN CALL YOU TOO FAST, is planned.