When Cinema Went Wild! The Orgy Plus Massacre series presents a visually-led sampler of sexy, scary and sensational cinema from the years 1950 to 1979, three of the most consequential decades in film history. It was during these years that global cinema came of age, not only in the technological sense but especially by way of pushing back pre-war restrictions of censorship, so much so that by the end of the 1960s, explicit sex and graphic violence had both become accepted in the mainstream. This new liberalism peaked in the mid-70s, when pretty much anything could be legally seen on commercially available film in one form in another, from picture houses to backstreet projection booths. Orgy Plus Massacre will focus on these decades when film-makers were increasingly free to express their most expansive, excessive and extreme visions on celluloid. Volume 1 includes over 100 rare and unusual photographs, with accompanying informative texts, from the years 1950 to 1956. This period saw global cinema in full recovery from the recent world war, and the transition of pulp narratives towards a darker realm informed by fears born of the new atomic age and the horrors of the concentration camps. The book is divided into five sections: Horror, Science Fiction, Mayhem (delinquency, crime, murder, atrocity), Myth (fantasies of other worlds and time periods), and last but not least, Sex (nudity, sexploitation, adult).
