Tags: death notice

Jimmy Sangster, whose scripts for The Curse of Frankenstein and Horror of Dracula helped seal the reputation of Hammer Studios as the home of British horror in the 1950s and 60s has passed away at the age of 83.

Born in Wales in 1927, Sangster started his movie career aged 16 as a clapper boy, working his way through various jobs, before ending up as assistant director on Hammer adaptations of BBC Radio serials.

Eventually landing the job of scripting the studio's adaption of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, he made one significant change to the source material, moving the emphasis in the story from the monster to the creator, consequently giving Peter Cushing his breakthrough starring role, and Hammer a hit movie, both in the UK and the US.(read more...)

Ingrid Pitt, best remembered to horror fans for her bloodthirsty and sexually charged roles in The Vampire Lovers, Countess Dracula, and The House that Dripped Blood has died at the age of 73. The BBC are reporting that she passed away in a London hospital after collapsing several days ago. (read more...)

Roy Ward Baker, who directed several British horror films in the late 1960s and early 1970s, passed away in his sleep on Tuesday, according to Guardian.co.uk. He was 93 years old. Born in 1916, Baker worked his way up the the ranks of the British film industry in the 1930s and 40s, moving from minor jobs to assistant director (he worked with Hitchcock on The Lady Vanishes). In 1947, he made his directorial debut with The October Man, which he made for Two Cities Films in 1947. He directed a number of notable pictures in the 1950s, including Don't Bother to Knock (starring Richard Widmark and Marilyn Monroe) and A Night to Remember (which documented the sinking of the RMS Titanic). As part of his extensive television work in the early 1960s, Baker helmed the episode of The Avengers which introduced Diana Rigg's Emma Peel to the world. (read more...)

Kevin McCarthy, an actor famous for his role in Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), died Saturday, September 12, 2010, at the age of 96, according to the New York Times. In Invasion, McCarthy perfectly captured the creeping paranoia of his character, Dr. Miles Bennell, as he discovers that his friends and neighbors are being replaced by emotionless pod people. His wild-eyed cries of "They're here! They're here! You're next!" in the film's prologue are today part of the sci-fi geek patois. In 1978, McCarthy appeared in a cameo in the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, yelling the same paranoid warnings. That same year, he appeared in Joe Dante's Piranha, marking the beginning of a fruitful collaboration between the actor and director. McCarthy would eventually appear in seven Dante films, the last being 2003's Looney Tunes: Back in Action.(read more...)

For a man who appeared in so few horror pictures, there was always something frightening about Dennis Hopper. As an artist and a man, he seemed to pursue madness. For half his life he lived on a diet of booze and amphetamines, pushing his body to the brink of destruction and inviting stories of a man out of control. There are tales of him pulling knives on co-stars, threats of violence and of him drinking his way into character. Charles Manson saw him as a kindred spirit and begged Hopper to play him onscreen. Look into his eyes on any film following Easy Rider (1968) and they show a man who has stared into the abyss.
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Word has reached us from the Latarnia forums that Jacinto Molina, better known to the horror world as actor-writer-director Paul Naschy, died on November 30th, 2009, after a year-long struggle with cancer. He was 75. Naschy broke onto the horror scene in 1968 with La marca del Hombre-lobo (known as Frankenstein's Bloody Terror in the United States), which introduced to the world his most lasting creation, the troubled lycanthrope Waldemar Daninsky. He would play Daninsky over a dozen times in the course of his career. He would also tackle such characters as Dr. Jekyll, Dracula, the Phantom of the Opera, Quasimodo, Frankenstein's monster, and Satan himself.(read more...)

David Carradine, star of the 1970s television series Kung Fu as well as a number of horror films, has been found dead in Bangkok, Thailand of undisclosed causes, according to the Associated Press. He was 72 years old. David, the son of legendary character actor John Carradine, worked in a diverse range of projects throughout his forty-six years as an actor, including crime movies, horror films, sci-fi, and martial arts flicks. He had worked with directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Martin Scorcese, Larry Cohen, Paul Bartel, Walter Hill, John Badham, and Quentin Tarantino. He was also a follower of Eastern philosophy, going so far as to write a book, The Spirit of the Shaolin, in the early 1990s.(read more...)

Jane Randolph, star of Cat People, Curse of the Cat People, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, died on May 4, 2009 in Gstaad, Switzerland, of complications from a broken hip, according to The Hollywood Reporter. She was 93 years old. In the two Cat People films, she played Alice, the love interest and eventual wife of Kent Smith's Ollie Reed.(read more...)

Over at the Classic Horror Film Board, Ted Newsom reported the recent passing of actor Robert Quarry, star of Count Yorga, Vampire and its sequel, The Return of Count Yorga. Apparently Quarry had been in poor health for quite some time.(read more...)

There's no way to do this impersonally, because there's nothing impersonal about the man. Forrest J Ackerman, the pun-lovin' mind behind Famous Monsters of Filmland, our Uncle Forry, died of heart failure yesterday, December 4, 2008, at 11:58 PM. It's not an exaggeration to say that the man defined what it meant to be a horror fan for a whole generation of Famous Monsters readers and he's a legend to newer horror geeks like me. To list the full extent of his contributions to the genre would be foolhardy and I'm not even going to try.(read more...)