I'll be posting about old horror movies. Thoughts, reviews, etc.
24 Jun 2021 3 minute read 0 comments Byzantius
As the film opens, the camera holds on a flame before slowly panning to a coffin. A voiceover informs us: The Screaming Skull is a motion picture that reaches its climax in shocking horror. It's impact is so terrifying that it may have an unforeseen...
15 Jun 2021 2 minute read 0 comments Byzantius
Well... We've looked at werewolves a few times, notably The Wolf Man and The Curse of the Werewolf, but it needs to be noted up front that this is not a werewolf movie. It says it is. It's even in the title. But it's not. Werewolves evoke a specifi...
19 Oct 2020 1 minute read 1 comment Byzantius
This movie exists in the Hammer Film universe of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and is distinct from the earlier Universal Wolf Man movies starring Lon Chaney Jr. as Larry Talbot/the Wolf Man. Fifteen minutes into this 1961 film, and it's booooring. It lacks...
3 Sep 2020 2 minute read 0 comments Byzantius
Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi brought monsters to life in Frankenstein, The Mummy, and Dracula. In this horror, they're again monsters, but of the human variety. Lugosi is a doctor who quotes Edgar Allen Poe and brags about building some of Poe's to...
29 Aug 2020 1 minute read 3 comments Byzantius
Often, with old movies, the pacing is so slow that the story can be hard to get into. 1939's The Phantom Creeps suffers from the exact opposite problem--the action and story are in your face from go, and so much happens in the 73 minutes that the fil...
19 Aug 2020 1 minute read 0 comments Byzantius
In 1941, Universal introduced Larry Talbot as the Wolf Man, but he was not Universal's first werewolf. That honor goes to Werewolf of London, released six years earlier. But it was Talbot, played by the legendary Lon Chaney Jr., who was destined to b...
18 Aug 2020 2 minute read 2 comments Byzantius
Coming off the success of Dracula and Frankenstein in 1931 and The Mummy earlier in 1932, Universal took another stab at horror (albeit without a titular monster) in The Old Dark House. We open on a married couple driving through a rain storm with th...
15 Aug 2020 1 minute read 0 comments Byzantius
Today I watched the 1956 Universal film The Creature Walks Among Us. It features the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and is considered by many to be the last film in the Universal Classic Monster series, which dates way back to the 1920s. And while i...
