Making Mischief: The Cult Films of Pete Walker

by Steve Chibnall, Michael Armstrong (Introduction)

Britain's Greatest Exploitation Film Director! "I deliberately rub people up the wrong way", Pete Walker once remarked, "I want them to come into the cinema and be shocked." And shock them he did. No other British film-maker achieved the level of transgression that Walker regularly delivered to cinema-goers in the 1970s.

Beginning his career by making skinflicks, Walker went on to direct a trio of bona fide horror film classics: House of Whipcord, Frightmare and House of Mortal Sin probe beneath the glossy surface of the permissive society to expose a malevolent underworld of madness, obsession and vindictive violence.

Pete Walker is British cinema's closest equivalent to Russ Meyer; a low-budget auteur with the talent to make mainstream movies but the desire to remain independent and offer mordant commentaries from the sidelines. Between 1967 and 1983 he directed sixteen films. All but one were self-financed, and all made a profit. They are time capsules of an age which is enjoying a new vogue, and feature famous faces like Susan George, Stephanie Beacham, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Vincent Price, as well as a host of glamorous starlets well known to Hammer horror fans.

Making Mischief is the first major critical study of the controversial director, and it has received the full cooperation of Pete Walker and his screenwriters. Extracts from a five hour interview with Walker appear throughout the book which also contains a wealth of previously unpublished photographs and, for the first time, reveals details of the Sex Pistols' movie A Star is Dead, which Walker was about to direct when the Pistols split.

223 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1998