HDK, in its series called "Morbid tales", proposes (in episodes) the "I Racconti di Dracula" soundtracks by Teeth of Glass, attaching to the cassette a booklet with the complete scripts. Here is the fourth episode, "Abisso Maledetto" ("Cursed Abyss"): A wealthy man with a history of drug addiction and depression lives on a remote Irish island where inexplicable and bloody events happen. Is the horror around him or... inside him?
Between the '60s and the '80s the production of pulp magazines in Italy was flourishing and incredibly varied: every month hundreds of paperbacks containing strange, adventurous or more often terrifying stories came out on the newsstands.
Among the most popular italian pulp magazines was the horror series "I Racconti di Dracula" (Tales of Dracula) published by Baron Cantarella: each issue of "I Racconti di Dracula" contained a grim and disturbing story, inspired by Italian gothic and giallo cinema, written by anonymous, non-professional authors, who typed in the evening after work to supplement their salary. The mainstream culture branded those publications as "garbage” and they were banned to those under 18.
In the 1980s, after the series had closed due to poor sales, someone came up with the idea of making a television adaptation of "I Racconti di Dracula". Docuvideo TV participated in a consortium of local TV networks that wanted to finance the production. Unfortunately, due to economic problems, the project did not succeed: what remains are the scripts and the soundtracks composed by the maestro Denti di Vetro (Teeth of Glass).
This tape (and the others that will follow) is a tribute by HDK to "I Racconti di Dracula", a series of pulp novels published in Italy from 1959 to 1981, today completely forgotten. A special thanks goes to all those authors with fictional names (Jeremy Selenius, Daniel Scott, Frank Graegorius, Red Schneider, Morton Sidney.... and others) who, in anonymity, wrote hundreds of wacky and sick stories that entertained and frightened us. They will never join the ranks of the true "writers", but they yet have a prestigious place in our personal Olympus of the Heroes of Weird Culture.
"Abisso Maledetto" by Max Dave was originally published in "I Racconti di Dracula" n. 73 (Edizioni Wamp, 1974).