October 13, 1965 If we judge Herschell Gordon Lewis movies based on the amount of over-the-top gore, then Color Me Blood Red is the mildest one I’ve seen. With its story of a creatively stalled painter who can’t get his colors right until he discovers blood is the perfect shade of red, you’d think it…

October 9, 1962 For some reason, I’ve never been fond of Donovan’s Brain… or any of its versions. When I watched three of them for discussion on the podcast, I rated Donovan’s Brain (1953) average, The Lady & the Monster (1944) slightly below average, and The Brain (1962) slightly above average… so it was my…

October 3, 1965 Purposeful or not, the opening of Repulsion evokes Psycho. However, instead of the camera slowly zooming-in on an eye, it slowly zooms out. This indicates we’re going to see events from the character’s (also a lovely blonde woman) point of view. At full frame, we immediately know something’s not right with Carol…

Note: After today’s review, Classic Horrors is taking a late summer vacation during the month of September while classichorrors.club gets a fresh coat of paint in preparation for October and the Halloween season. Follow us on social media for quick fixes so you don’t get out of the habit… There’s an explosive opening to Night…

Quake Threat Worsens It’s Never Been So Hot Cyclone Horror No, these aren’t actual headlines from this week’s newspapers, although they may as well be. Instead, they’re fictitious headlines from newspapers in the 1961 film, The Day the Earth Caught Fire. Apparently, the kind of disasters we’re experiencing now with climate change can also occur…

Released in 1963, two years after production was completed, The Curse of the Crying Woman, is the fourth Mexican horror film dealing with the subject of La Llorona, “the crying woman” or “the wailer.” However, it’s the furthest removed from the original legend of a vengeful ghost that roams near bodies of water mourning the…

In my review of Black Pit of Dr. M (1959), I wrote about a characteristic that seemed common among the Mexican horror films I’d seen so far. The Witch’s Mirror (1962) corroborates it. Three out of four movies from the Indicator Mexico Macabre box set, plus the handful I’ve seen at Monster Bash, all have…

In the wonderful and fact-filled book that comes with Indicator’s Mexico Macabre box set, Jose Luis Ortega Torres says about The Brainiac: …it is with this grotesque monster that Mexican cinema finds it greatest, one-hundred percent native horror icon, without any recognizable antecedent in any foreign myth or folklore. He is not a vampire or…

You must pay attention when you’re reading subtitles in a foreign film. When an inexplicably curious guest at Sir Reginald Thorne’s castle in The Seventh Grave (1965) stumbles upon a dead body, another guest asks, “Did you see something in his buttonhole,” I did a double take. I know, my mind is in the gutter,…

The Monster of the Opera (1964), aka The Vampire of the Opera, has been on my watch list for quite some time, but I’m not sure how I first became aware of it. It’s inclusion in Severin’s Danza Macabre box set provided most of my excitement for purchasing it, especially since I already owned Lady…