Bruce G Hallenbeck is an author, actor and screenwriter. His books include The Hammer Vampire, the Amicus Anthology and Rock'N'Roll Monsters: The American International Story. Hallenbeck is considered a leading authority on British horror films and was recently a special guest at the International Vampire Film and Arts Festival in London, where he did a stage presentation with several actresses from Hammer films. His own films include The Drowned and Fangs, both of which are streamed on Amazon Prime, and he has written for the legendary magazine Little Shoppe of Horrors for nearly forty years. He lives in upstate New York with his wife Rosa, their dog, four cats and several ghosts.

Roger William Corman was born April 5, 1926, in Detroit, Michigan. Initially following in his father's footsteps, Corman studied engineering at Stanford University but while in school, he began to lose interest in the profession and developed a growing passion for film. Upon graduation, he worked a total of three days as an engineer at US Electrical Motors, which cemented his growing realization that engineering wasn't for him. He quit and took a job as a messenger for 20th Century Fox, eventually rising to the position of story analyst. After a term spent studying modern English literature at England's Oxford University and a year spent bopping around Europe, Corman returned to the US, intent on becoming a screenwriter/producer. He sold his first script in 1953, The House in the Sea, which was eventually filmed and released as Highway Dragnet (1954). Horrified by the disconnect between his vision for the project and the film that eventually emerged, Corman took his salary from the picture, scraped together a little capital and set himself up as a producer, turning out Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954). Corman used his next picture, The Fast and the Furious (1954), to finagle a multi-picture deal with a fledgling company called American Releasing Corp. (ARC). It would soon change its name to American-International Pictures (AIP) and with Corman as its major talent behind the camera, would become one of the most successful independent studios in cinema history. With no forma