Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man
If you want to have some fun with your fellow horror film aficionados, ask them what they’d rate as the single most effective scene for mood and atmosphere in any of the Universal monster movies.
The Lodger
Marie Belloc Lowndes’s 1913 novel The Lodger—an expansion of her short story of the same name—has been an enticing proposition for filmmakers, and well it should, given its delectable “what-if” premise: Jack the Ripper had to have lived somewhere, allowing that he was not unhoused, so what if he lived in the spare room you were renting out?
Better Than One
Were you to remark that the 1940s represented a peak in American pop-cultural horror, most people would automatically think you were talking about movies.
House of Horrors + The Brute Man
The shadowy figure of Rondo Hatton creeps appropriately over the opening-credits sequences of both House of Horrors and The Brute Man, the two official films in which the hulking journalist-turned-actor stepped into the role of a spine-snapping villain known as The Creeper.
The Seventh Victim
Though it’s perhaps not as widely known as the other B-horror films that Val Lewton produced for RKO between 1942 and 1946, The Seventh Victim is the cycle’s poetic pinnacle.