Review: 'Ad Nauseum: Newsprint Nightmares from the '70s & '80s'

As a young child in the seventies and early eighties, I'd flip through the newspaper every day and stop at two sections: the comics and the movies. When I'd come across an ad for a horror movie, I'd inevitably think, "What kind of disturbed, sick individual would want to torture themselves by watching this horrible stuff?" What I should have been thinking when perusing the paper was "Does anyone actually think B.C. is funny?"

As I got older, I still thought B.C. was crap, but I grew up to be the very kind of sick individual who'd watch things like Suspiria, Piranha, Nightmare on Elm Street, and The Thing. Looking back on the newspaper ads Michael Gingold compiled in Ad Nauseum, I can still understand where six-year-old Mike Segretto was coming from. With just a single image and a single tag line to get asses in seats, horror movie ads could waste no time with subtlety. "Have you ever held a skeleton in your arms?" "The picture they said could never be shown..." "A lethal terror snowballs into Hell!" "The only thing more terrifying than the last 12 minutes of this film are the first 80."  "To avoid fainting, keep repeating: It's only a movie.. only a movie.. only a movie.." Couple those lines with images of decapitated heads on serving trays, kitchen knives being plunged hither and yon, the dummy from Magic, or most terrifying of all, Marcel Marceau's head growing from the wrist of a walking hand and you've got a combo that won't be easily forgotten. 

Once you filter this material through the low-grade printing of a daily newspaper, you have something even more affecting, something seedier, especially when viewed in a family paper just a few pages beyond the innocuous stupidities of B.C. It makes the wrongness of horror movie ads that much wronger, that much more disturbing to impressionable minds.

These ads certainly made an impression on Gingold, who began clipping them and filing them away in 1979 and kept up with his strange habit for ten years. He published his first collection of these clippings as Ad Nauseum in 2021, but realizing something was missing, has filled in a 1970s-size gap in his book by culling another decade's worth of ads from online sources for the new second printing. He also includes excerpts from period reviews to provide a little text beyond the tag lines, his own brief introduction, and Joe Dante's foreword (which fixates on sex movies, for some reason). The biggest shocker amongst these review excerpts are the good reviews Rex Reed gave to The Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I though that guy hated everything!