death notice

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...)

Special effects guru Stan Winston passed away Sunday, June 15th, 2008, at age 62, after a long struggle with multiple myeloma. Winston straddled the worlds of makeup and visual effects, contributing to such horror films as Dead & Buried, The Monster Squad, and Interview with the Vampire. Over the course of his career, he was nominated for ten Academy Awards, winning four of them (one each for Aliens and Jurassic Park and two for Terminator 2).(read more...)

Word came in from Jim Clatterbaugh over on the Classic Horror Film Board (no relation to Classic-Horror.com) that Hazel Court, a actress who added so much to the horror genre in the course of her career, passed on this morning, April 15th, 2008, at the age of 82. Her autobiography, Hazel Court: Horror Queen, was set to make its United States premiere at the Monster Bash convention in June of this year. No word yet on how this sad news affects that.(read more...)

Over at the Classic Horror Film Boards (no relation to Classic-Horror.com), Tom Weaver reported that Ben Chapman, the actor who performed as the Creature in the on-land sequences of Creature from the Black Lagoon, died this morning (February 21st) of undisclosed causes. He was 82.

Ben's death has particular meaning here at Classic-Horror, because he was one of the first interviews we ran, all the way back in 2002. You can read it here.(read more...)

Roy Scheider, the actor who famously exclaimed "We're gonna need a bigger boat" in Jaws (1975), died Sunday at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences hospital. He was 75 years old. The cause of death has not been disclosed, but Scheider had been undergoing treatment for multiple myleoma for the past two years at the University's Myeloma Institute for Research and Therapy. Scheider made his feature debut in a horror film, Del Tenney's 1962 vengeance-from-beyond-the-grave romp The Curse of the Living Corpse.(read more...)

As you likely know by now, Maila Nurmi, aka Vampira the first television horror host, passed away January 10, 2008 of natural causes. Although she gave much to the horror community -- if the invention of the late night horror host concept wasn't enough, she also co-starred in the immortal Plan 9 from Outer Space as Bela Lugosi's dead wife -- she did not have very much money in the end. Currently, a number of fans are working to get Nurmi interred at Hollywood Forever cemetery, where she rightly belongs.(read more...)