I think you don't really have time to read about the fascinating byways of old genre fandom, MB, but this is a short article about editor/publisher Calvin T. Beck and his
Castle of Frankenstein:
http://21ca.com/flickhead/2_14_Beck_CoF.htmlThere's a long thread on the Monster Kids board from a few years ago when
Little Shoppe of Horrors ran a two part survey/expose of Beck and CoF. Interesting discussion.
Apart from the legendary cult status of the magazine, Beck is best remembered now because his mother seems fairly conclusively to have been a major model for "Norman's" Mom in Robert Bloch's original novel
Psycho. Reportedly, Helen Beck went
everywhere with her son but perhaps not to the extent that "Norman's" Mom did.
Castle of Frankenstein was ahead of its time in treating horror films as objects of serious, adult film criticism. The mag ran stills and articles about European avant-garde films and the kind of pictures associated with serious art houses in New York, San Francisco, and one or two other cities back in the Sixties.
G.