INTERVIEW: Chris Poggiali and Michael Gingold, Authors of Armies of the Night
11/13 @ Proctors, Schenectady
“In the years following its release, The Warriors has undergone a critical reappraisal and is now properly recognized as a masterpiece.”
Armies of the Night: The Warriors and Its Legacy, the new book from authors Chris Poggiali and Michael Gingold, published in 2025, was born during the rise of fanzine culture in the 1980s. Gingold had started Scareaphanalia in the early 80s. Poggiali was an early subscriber to the zine and eventually went on to start his own, Temple of Schlock.
“When I was in high school, there weren’t nearly as many kids who were into horror as there are now,” Gingold says. “Now, being into horror is cool, but it wasn’t like that back in the early ‘80s when I was growing up. I was writing reviews for my high school paper but once I found zines, I thought, ‘Here’s a way I can really pour out all of my love for horror in a format where like-minded fans are going to read it.’”
“It was Halloween 1986 and I went to a double feature of Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead,” Poggiali adds, “and there was a stack of these newsletters printed on green paper. I grabbed one and went and sat down while I was waiting for the movies to start. I started flipping through this and I thought, ‘This is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.’
“Everything I’m interested in – Godzilla, slasher movies, blaxploitation, biker movies – all of it is in this thing.”
Similar to the music zines that were born out of an explosion of punk rock in New York City and Southern California, movie zines were inspired by films from the Hollywood renaissance of the late ‘60s and ‘70s, which challenged the conventions of traditional Hollywood storytelling. Films that might be considered “dangerous” by the normies.
Among those dangerous films was Walter Hill’s The Warriors. Based on the novel of the same name by Sol Yurick, The Warriors follows a Coney Island gang of teenagers as they try to make it back to their home turf from the Bronx after being falsely accused of assassinating the leader of a rival gang. Upon its release, The Warriors was mired in controversy and the critical response was generally mixed… and that’s probably being generous.
“My biggest memory [of The Warriors] is not watching it,” Gingold says. “At the time it came out, there were a few murders that were connected to the film and it earned a reputation in the press as a ‘dangerous film.’ When I finally saw it, and this must have been on video or cable, my impression was, ‘What’s all the shouting about?’”
“A lot of people pointed to the ad campaign and accused it of inciting violence,” Poggiali adds. “It showed all of the gang members and said, ‘These are the armies of the night, they outnumber the police and they could run New York.’ [After the controversy] the first thing Paramount did was pull the ad campaign once the violent incidents started being blamed on the movie.”
“In fact, the follow up ads emphasized certain reviews that said, ‘This movie isn’t so bad after all,’” Gingold continues. “They were literally just The Warriors and then quotes from reviews sticking up for the film.”
In the years following its release, The Warriors has undergone a critical reappraisal and is now properly recognized as a masterpiece. In those same intervening years, Gingold and Poggiali kept writing and stayed in touch. In fact, Gingold, then a managing editor for Fangoria, brought on Poggiali as a contributor.
As The Warriors was approaching its 40th anniversary, Arrow Video approached Gingold to write about the film.
“I had done a bunch of location featurettes about movies shot in New York City like C.H.U.D and Brain Damage,” Gingold explains. “They had been doing these little monographs about certain films and filmmakers and even though I specialized in horror, they came to me about writing one of these little books about The Warriors.”
“I jumped at the idea because The Warriors has always been one of my favorite films,” Gingold continues. “Chris [Poggiali] knew more about that movie than anyone else I know so I asked him to come aboard.”
In February of 2019, just as the monograph was to be released to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the film, Gingold and Poggiali were informed that Arrow Video was discontinuing that book line.
“Long story short, [Arrow Video] sold the rights back to us and I took it to 1984 Publishing,” Gingold says. “Our publisher, Matthew Chojnacki was excited about the idea but told us that in order for him to put it out it would have to be expanded.”
“There was a lot of material, like a comic book adaptation of the movie as well as a comic book sequel to the movie, that we had overlooked when we initially wrote the book,” Poggiali says. “We were able to include all of that as well as a bunch of additional interviews that we conducted.”
“I’m almost very grateful that things worked out the way they did,” Gingold says. “The book is much better now than it would have been had it come out in its original incarnation.”
To celebrate the release of Armies of the Night: The Warriors and Its Legacy, Gingold and Poggiali will attend a special screening of the film at the GE Theatre at Proctor’s on Thursday, November 13. Tickets are on sale at https://www.atproctors.org/event/icfs-presents-a-45th-and-a-half-anniversary-celebration-of-the-warriors-1979/