Choose Your Own…Horror?

One weird and fun side effect of this pandemic quarantine is that I’ve found myself with a lot of extra time to work on this site. Between my wife and I having our first child, crazy work schedules and just life in one’s 40s, I haven’t had as much time to write and podcast as much as I’d like. So I’ve been taking as much advantage of this time to tackle all kinds of articles and catch up on scanning ephemera that I’ve been wanting to share here at Branded. I’ve also been going through years worth of notes about other little projects I wanted to tackle, and some of theme have just been odd little one-off ideas that I’ve wanted to try. So today I wanted to share a handful of silly fake book covers that I’ve been meaning to create for years.

I’ve been a huge fan of the Choose Your Own Adventure series of books since I was a kid, and there was a point in the early to mid 2000s when I found myself amassing a gigantic collection of books in that style (for lack of a better term, gamebooks.) There was a point where I had roughly 90% of all these kinds of books, at least the ones released in the 80s, and I was planning on creating a new column on this site where I reviewed them book by book. But the obsession of collecting them and hunting through a ton of second hand shops to complete the various sub-collections (for series like Which Way, Find Your Fate, Everquest, CYOA, etc) the whole project just started becoming way too big to tackle. So I put it on the back burner. But before I gave up on it entirely I had this idea that I thought might be fun, which was to create my own covers for a series of Choose Your Own Adventure books, but steeping them specifically in the horror genre. I thought it would be fun to mix that style of book with the movie novelization genre to create a series of Choose Your Own Horror book series based on 80s era horror movies. So here are 13 faux covers I finally designed the other day that I thought wold be fun to share here.

So I initially started by envisioning some covers for more kid-centric 80s horror that I love, stuff that is a lot of fun but more on the obscure side. The Lady in White was a must on that list, but I also wanted to tackle some weirder films like The Quest (aka Frog Dreaming or The Go-Kids) and Making Contact, both of which I’ve written about here at Branded before.

But then I decided to branch out by creating covers for film/books that has artwork that really messed with my head as a kid when I used to scan the horror section in the video store for awesome looking VHS covers. I was always obsessed with the covers to films like Evilspeak and The Supernaturals for instance.

But the granddaddy of disturbing horror vhs covers for me has always been Chopping Mall. That image of a cyborg gauntlet grasping a shopping bag full of body parts filled me with so much dread as a kid. I’ve had nightmares about that VHS cover…

But I also wanted to highlight some of my personal favorite 80s era horror, stuff that would never have been made into a kid’s novelization or Choose Your Own Adventure style book, but I would still buy in a heartbeat if they were real. Stuff like Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark or Clive Barker’s Nightbreed…

There were also pieces of poster artwork that I felt screamed out for this treatment, movies like Night of the Creeps (the cover of which already looks like a creepy romance novel), Return of the Living Dead (which would make a great CYOA book), and Fright Night…

I also wanted to get one of the big three horror icons in this as well. There weren’t many good Friday the 13th paintings that featured Jason Vorhees back in the day (the posters were either photographs or paintings of a man behind a curtain which really doesn’t illustrate the character well) and the Halloween movies actually had novelizations back in the day so it didn’t seem all that creative to repurpose that art. So I went with A Nightmare on Elm Street and Freddy. This alternate poster artwork for A Nightmare On Elm Street 2 was perfect…

Lastly, I couldn’t create a series like this without creating a cover for one of my most favorite films ever, The Monster Squad. I even took a little extra time to fix more of the text on the cover to more accurately reflect the movie and this cover image (I got lazy with the rest and left the original author and illustrator intact on all the covers.)