Twice the Thrills! Twice the Chills!

By the mid1950s theater attendance had drastically decreased. To combat this decline, film distributors began releasing pre-packaged genre double-bills, with two films sold to theaters as a like-minded set—horror and science fiction foremost among them. Though many of these genre terrors were low-budget and low-end, others, such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Horror of Dracula and The Fly, became bona fide classics. Beginning with Universal-International’s 1955 pairing of Revenge of the Creature and Cult of the Cobra, 147 officially sanctioned horror and sci-fi double-bills were released over a 20-year period.

This book takes us year-by-year through each double feature, giving some the opportunity to relive that cinematically rich period and others an introduction to an important and neglected aspect of genre cinema that promised to bring “Twice the thrills! Twice the chills!”