Tags: death notice

The world truly has lost one of the greatest writers of the 20^th century. Ray Bradbury, well known science fiction author among thousands of fans, died on June 5^th, 2012 after a lengthy illness.

Bradbury is most well known for sci-fi novels like Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles. He was also known for dipping his toes in the fantasy and horror genre, with such novels like Something Wicked This Way Comes. He wrote several upon several short stories, 27 of them being adapted for EC Comics.(read more...)

I will always remember April 14^th, 2012 as probably the saddest day for any horror fan. It makes me so depressed to report on not only two deaths that happened in the same week, but on the same day too, and of very talented actors at that. The great Jonathan Frid, who was immortalized on television as Barnabas Collins in the daytime gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, died last Saturday at age 87 of natural causes.(read more...)

If I don't hear about any horror fan screaming out into the night at this sad and grim news, then I will truly be surprised! I know there's a few tears in my eyes already. It appears that William Finley, beloved character actor, passed away on April 14^th, 2012 due to complications after surgery.

Finley was mainly known for his collaborative efforts with noted director Brian De Palma, whose film credits with him include The Wedding Party, Dionysus, Sisters, and of course, Phantom of the Paradise. Finley was also known for his working relationship with horror film director Tobe Hooper as well, starring in Eaten Alive, The Funhouse and Night Terrors. He also starred in Wise Blood alongside Brad Douriff and wrote the script for The First Time. According to IMDB, his last known role was George Tilden in Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia.(read more...)

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...)