Classic-Horror.com | Reviewing the History of Horror Movies

Our editor-in-chief Nate Yapp is proud to have contributed to the new book Hidden Horror: A Celebration of 101 Underrated and Overlooked Fright Flicks, edited by Aaron Christensen. Another contributors include Anthony Timpone, B.J. Colangelo, Dave Alexander, Classic-Horror.com's own Robert C. Ring and John W. Bowen. Pick up a copy today from Amazon.com!

Review: Cat People (1942)

Submitted by Nate Yapp on Mon, 2005-10-24 00:00

In 1942, RKO needed to recoup its losses from the financial headaches surrounding Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. They contracted Val Lewton, a Jack-of-all-Trades in Hollywood, to produce a series of B-horror movies with predetermined, audience-tested titles. The plan may have been cheap quickies, but the result was far different: nine complex, modern, and shocking films. Jacques Tourneur's Cat People is the first in this series, and set the standard of quality to which the rest adhered.(read more...)

Review: Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1974)

Submitted by Nate Yapp on Thu, 2005-10-20 00:00

Captain Kronos can kill three men at once. Captain Kronos can take a vampire bite without turning into one of the undead himself. Captain Kronos is down with G-O-D. Captain Kronos can smoke pot and not get the munchies. Captain Kronos will take your sister out on a Friday night, treat her to a movie, dinner, and fantastic sex, and still have her home before curfew. Captain Kronos makes delicious honey-glazed ham and always shares with the orphans of Dusseldorf. Captain Kronos invented Google. Captain Kronos is better than you.(read more...)

Review: Kolchak: The Night Stalker - The Complete Series (1974)

Submitted by Nate Yapp on Mon, 2005-10-17 01:23

In 1972, "Dark Shadows" creator Dan Curtis collaborated with famed horror writer Richard Matheson to bring an unpublished story by Jeffrey Grant Rice to the small screen as the television movie The Night Stalker. The film, about rumpled news reporter Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) and his investigation of a Vegas vampire, aired to outstanding ratings and strong critical response. Based on that success and that of the 1973 follow-up The Night Strangler, Universal commissioned a weekly television series that ran for 20 episodes in the 1974-75 season. Most of the cast from the movies returned for "Kolchak: The Night Stalker," and Rice took a creator's credit, but Curtis and Matheson declined involvement.(read more...)

Review: Army of Darkness (1992)

Submitted by Chrissy Derbyshire on Fri, 2005-10-14 22:25

Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness is not a great horror film. Not an auspicious start to any review. Let’s take it one step further. Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness is not a horror film at all. It’s a madcap comedy, avec zombies – but don’t expect Shaun of the Dead either. This third and (thus far) final film in the Evil Dead series is an amalgam of Three Stooges and Monty Python style comedy antics and groovy Harryhausen-esque special effects, all squeezed into an Evil Dead plot so thin it looks ready to rupture at any moment.(read more...)

Review: The Cat and the Canary (1927)

Submitted by Jenn Dlugos on Wed, 2005-10-12 00:00

The opening credits roll. The audience sees a man immersed in a fortress of oversized medicine bottles, presumably on the brink of madness. An image of a cat is superimposed to the right of the screen. The man? He’s the canary awaiting slaughter. Most would assume that this scene could only be created by modern movie technology.(read more...)

Review: Evil Dead II (1987)

Submitted by Chrissy Derbyshire on Fri, 2005-10-07 00:00

Those ghastly deadites are back, and this time it’s comedy. From the creepy, ghost-train opening it’s hard to discern whether Evil Dead II is really a horror film or not. By the time Ash starts chasing his hand around with a shotgun, it’s pretty evident that the film owes a lot to both comedy and horror. Filmlore tells us that The Evil Dead was so over-the-top that many viewers thought it was a spoof. So when director Sam Raimi decided to make a sequel, it became more of a comedy remake of the original. This would explain Ash’s otherwise perplexing behaviour: returning to the house in which he had, one movie ago, almost been killed by things which were evil and, moreover, dead.(read more...)

Review: The Thing From Another World (1951)

Submitted by Chris Justice on Thu, 2005-10-06 00:00

The Thing from Another World, appropriately abridged and known more commonly as The Thing, is one of the seminal 1950s creature feature films that paved the bridge between the horror and science fiction genres. Filmed in Montana's Glacier National Park and an ice storage plant in Los Angeles, The Thing launched the 1950s onslaught of alien invader science fiction classics including War of the Worlds and the cultish Invaders from Mars.(read more...)

Review: Spider Baby (1968)

Submitted by Nate Yapp on Wed, 2005-10-05 00:00

From the moment Lon Chaney Jr's craggy voice begins crooning about the maddest story ever told over the opening credits, it's apparent that Spider Baby is going to be something different from your average homicidal-family romp. Filmed in 1964, but stuck in cinematic limbo for four years, director Jack Hill's debut swirls with a peculiarly innocent sense of horror.(read more...)

Review: The Fog (1980)

Submitted by Chris Justice on Mon, 2005-10-03 00:00

I can't remember exactly when I first saw The Fog, but I know the experience was within a year or so of its original 1980 release. As a kid growing up in the 1970s, I had the good fortune of having my formative years molded by one of the most powerful, prolific chapters of American cinema. All right, let's face it: I was truly blessed. I didn't know it then, but I sure do realize that now. The Fog is one of many films that forever embedded the power of cinema in my impressionable, adolescent brain. The movie freaked me out when I was a kid, and that experience is probably one of the reasons why I currently write for Classic-Horror. Although released in 1980, the film bleeds with everything that is wonderful about 1970s American cinema.(read more...)

Review: A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Submitted by Chrissy Derbyshire on Sat, 2005-10-01 00:00

The worst thing you can do before viewing Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street is to watch one of its sequels. It isn’t that watching the sequel first spoils the chronological flow of the story. No. It is merely because the sequels are predominately ridiculous trash. This can colour your preconceptions of the original movie which is, in fact, rather good. For A Nightmare on Elm Street is, believe it or not, a horror film. It is (brace yourselves) scary. Unlike the pseudo-scary, pseudo-comic franchise that grew out of it, the original film contains some memorable images, interesting plot twists and (gasp, faint) even a decent-to-good script.(read more...)