Phil Hardy, who died on 8th April 2014, was a film and music industry writer. Born in Yorkshire in 1945, Hardy studied at the University of Sussex and the University of California, Berkeley. As a busy journalist he contributed to Variety, Time Out, and other magazines while acting as a consultant on music business issues and founding Music & Copyright, an influential industry publication.
His 1986 tome The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies (Harper Collins) covering nearly 1,300 films from across the globe, via 400 pages, with over 450 black and white, became a must-have for serious horror aficionados.
Meanwhile, it was as the chief editor and contributing writer of the hugely influential The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Horror, Hardy will best be remembered by horror fans. Published in 1984, the book provides a chronological history of the horror film since its inception in 1896 through 1983. Like the previous western and science fiction volumes published by Aurum (and also edited by Hardy), most theatrically released films, including those from the silent era, have entries. The horror volume is international in scope, providing coverage of all films from all countries that have ever produced a horror-related title. The contributors were Tom Milne, Paul Willemen, Julian Petley, and Tim Pulleine.
Video Watchdog‘s Tim Lucas has acclaimed the first edition as “the greatest and most influential of all books on the subject”. In a later review, he described the book as “an intoxicating road map to further study and the enthusiasms of its authors (…) planted the seeds for the rediscovery and reappraisal of such cinéastes as Jesús Franco, José Mojica Marins, Pupi Avati, and Jean Rollin… Hardy’s hefty tome redefined how horror cinema was perceived by its admirers more so than any other single work…”
An expanded second edition, nearly 90 pages longer, was published in 1993. Kim Newman wrote nearly all of the book’s new material. This second edition was reprinted in 1995. As an indication of their massive worth, all four volumes of Phil Hardy’s Aurum Encylcopedia (horror, westerns, science fiction and gangsters) have been published in the U.S. by The Overlook Press, with the same contents.
Horrorpedia salutes Phil Hardy’s huge contributions to our knowledge of films and music and we have to say that despite the wealth of information on the web we still consult his Aurum Encyclopedia books regularly for reference, opinionated prose and pure pleasure.
