We’ll begin with a reign of terror, a few murders here and there, murders of great men, murders of little men – well, just to show we make no distinction. I might even wreck a train or two… just these fingers around a signalman’s throat, that’s all. – The Invisible Man (1933) The post Quote From The Invisible Man appeared first on Horror Movie Maven ..read more

I loved the new Alien movie, Aliens: Covenant. When I was raving about it at work, my co-worker sent me a pdf of the original script for Prometheus. He said, “Did you ever read the screenplay that eventually become Prometheus? I think it’s a much better story and ties up quite a few (unnecessary) loose ends.” He was right. While they kept a lot of elements from the original script, the first version was better. I recommend reading it if you like the Alien franchise. I found a copy of the script online. Reading it is nearly as good as seeing it on the screen. The post The Original Prometh ..read more

Sometimes you see an actor in a horror film and that person just gets to you. Their acting alone makes them crawl out from the screen and whisper terrifying things in your ear. Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger, Gunnar Hansen as Leatherface, and Doug Bradley as Pinhead are just few that spring to mind. But even rarer are those actors whose surpass a single character and become a name of their own. Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Lon Chaney. These are a handful of the kings of horror cinema. Conrad Veidt stands among them. Conrad Veidt (pronounced like the word white starting with a v) was a Germa ..read more

My take: An interesting zombie film from Spain that has a good balance of scary and cheesy scenes. Rating: 3 out of 4 stars 1972 seems to have been full of characters displaying wonton acts of hubris. In Baron Blood, a character decides to go and awaken his long dead and devilishly evil ancestor. In Tombs of the Blind Dead, a girl goes and decides it is a good idea to sleep alone in an old, abandoned monastery. Why not? What could happen? Then, when she winds up dead, her friends decide they should also go to this old monastery. This despite the fact that every local who speaks of ..read more

My take: This is a standard Italian gothic. Only see this one if you love others from this subgenre. Rating: 2 out of 4 stars In Baron Blood, Peter Kleist returns to his family’s ancestral castle. He has found a piece of parchment which claims to hold the key to awakening Peter’s ancestor, Baron Otto von Kleist. The Baron earned the nickname Baron Blood due to his sadistic, murderous ways in the 16th century. So, Peter finds a cute girl (as always seems to happen in horror films) and they sneak into the castle to awaken Baron Blood. Hubris. Pure hubris. And it goes about as well as you could ..read more

My take: This movie is made up of five gruesome tales. So, there’s sure to be at least one you like. Rating: 3 out of 4 stars Five strangers are on a tour of a catacombs. They fall behind the tour guide in the tunnels, and find themselves lost. A door opens mysteriously. When they enter the room, a robed man appears, and the door slides shut behind them. This is the cryptkeeper (no, he does not look like that beloved little skeletal corpse from the TV version in the 90s). He bids them to set, which the group begrudgingly does, while asking why they are there. The cryptkeeper takes each perso ..read more

My take: This is a lot of cheesy, Italian-gothic goodness. Tropes abound but there are enough scares to keep it fun and interesting. Rating: 3 out of 4 stars Like many of the films I have watched previously, Devil’s Nightmare is chock full of gothic horror tropes: There’s a creepy castle (with bonus torture devices in the attic) The baron in said castle has a bubbling, smoky laboratory (though he does alchemy, not science) There’s a demonic curse on the baron A group of tourists get stranded at said castle with said baron One thing that sets this movie apart from those before it, howe ..read more

My take: Riddled with suspense, this movie is right in line with the classics and it definitely one I would watch again. Rating: 3 out of 4 stars Synopsis of It Follows When you have sex in a horror movie, bad things happen. And bad things certainly happen in It Follows. The story is about Jay, a young and beautiful college girl. On a date with a guy she likes, Hugh, she has an intimate tryst with him in the back of his car. While she basks in the post-coital afterglow, however, Hugh chloroforms her. Poster for It Follows showing the car with that fateful tryst. Jay awakes tied t ..read more

My take: Was it a ghost? Was it madness? I’m still not sure, and I don’t think that is a good thing. Rating: 1 out of 4 stars This movie raised a lot of questions in my mind about the early 1970s: Were there a lot of hippies everywhere? Did people just roam around the country and do nothing? Why was the soundtrack so terrible? Did people listen to that crap? Why is the main character so mindlessly happy at the strangest moments? The movie is about a couple and their friend. The female in the couple is Jessica (of the movie title), who just got out of a mental facility. Her and he ..read more

My take: This story was a bit too slow for my liking, but it was one of the more interesting Countess Bathory stories I have seen. Rating: 2 out of 4 stars Daughters of Darkness (not to be confused with Daughter of Darkness) is a slow-moving horror film from the 1970s with a distinctly European feeling to it. I get the impression while watching it that I am missing something or that I may have liked it better if I was living in Italy in 1971. The movie follows two young newlyweds on their honeymoon. They stop at a coastal town , where they meet a strange older woman and her young female comp ..read more