Curt Siodmak (I Walked with a Zombie, Son of Dracula) made a joke to producer George Waggner that he needed a downpayment for a car and that they should make Frankenstein Wolfs the Meat Man. It was lunch. He was joking. Waggner called him to his office and said, “Go ahead, buy the car.” That’s how this movie, the sequel to The Wolf Man and The Ghost of Frankenstein got made.

Bela Lugosi plays Frankenstein’s Monster here, eight years after he turned down the role that made Boris Karloff famous. This follows up the Monster getting the brain of Ygor and speaking in his voice at the end of Ghost. In the original version of this film, the Monster would speak for the entire film — in a Hungarian accent — and audiences could not accept it. Also, the fact that the Monster was blind as a side effect of the transplant was negated and many of these scenes were cut.

Grave robbers break into the coffin of Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.) and remove the wolfsbane on his body, which turns him back into the werewolf that his father’s bullets put to sleep. He makes his way to Vasaria, the home of Dr. Frankenstein, who he hopes can cure him once and for all.

There’s also the plot of Dr. Mannering, Lionel Atwill’s Mayor and Baroness Elsa Frankenstein trying to destroy the Monster. As a kid, I booed these horrible humans and their attempts to make this movie boring by stopping these awesome creatures from causing chaos.

Lugosi turned sixty while making this movie and suffered from exhaustion, so he was often doubled for any of the strenuous parts of the film. This is also the last Universal Monster movie for Dwight Frye, who died the very same year.

Here’s something nice, at least. The German shepherd that played Bruno is dog Bruno, who he adopted after he played the wolf that attacked him in The Wolf Man.

This film was part of the Shock Theater package that started off the monster kid era. These 52 films are pretty much the foundations of pre-1948 horror. Trust me, I watched them all so many times that I can recite them when asked.

In today’s Marvel movie world, we just accept movies crossing over and universe building. These movies just made it happen. They’re so ingrained in our DNA that crossover movies — King Kong vs. Godzilla and Alien vs. Predator — pay tribute by using the music and scenes from this film.

This is the last Howling movie to play in U.S. theaters. Gary Brandner, author of the Howling novels, approved director Philippe Mora’s purchase of the rights to his novels. The credits even claim that this is based on his book The Howling III: Echoes. But in truth, it has a different setting and really only has werewolves as sympathetic characters.

Professor Harry Beckmeyer is an Australian anthropologist who has found footage of aborigines sacrificing a wolf creature in 1905. After hearing that a werewolf has killed a man in Siberia, he tries — and fails — to warn the President of the U.S. about the potential of lycan assaults.

Meanwhile, an abused girl who just might so happen to be a werewolf is running away from home. Her name is Jerboa and after meeting a young American named Donny Martin, she gets a role in the horror film, Shape Shifters Part 8. She gets into horror movies and after watching a werewolf film with Donny, she reveals that transformations don’t happen that way. He asks her how she knows, she goes full furry beast and he responds as we all would, by engaging her in some interspecies aardvarking.

As the movie wraps, strobe lights cause Jerboa to transform. She runs into the night and is hit by a car. When the doctors try to save her, they notice that she is with child and has a marsupial-like pouch on her belly. Holy cow, this movie! I can’t believe that I watched that, much less typed it out for you to read.

There’s also a Russian ballerina that happens to be a werewolf, because I guess if you bark at the moon you have really wonderful artistic abilities as a bonus secondary mutation.

Suffice to say that you should stick with this movie, if only to see Dame Edna out of drag as  Barry Humphries and a pack of werewolves go wild at the cheapest looking Academy Awards outside of The Lonely Lady.

Phillipe Mora has made some out there movies, like The Beast Within, The Howling II, The Return of Captain Invincible, Pterodactyl Woman from Beverly Hills and many more. His films aren’t always great, but they’re never boring.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime and Tubi. Shout! Factory has also released this on blu ray.

For the seventh appearance of Count Waldemar Daninsky, Paul Naschy threw out everything that came before and decided on a new origin for El Hombre Lobo. Now, his bloodline was cursed by Countess Bathory, a servant of Satan who one of Daninsky’s ancestors had burned at the stake.

Well, there’s that, and then there’s Daninsky killing a wolf on his grounds that transforms into a man. He’s cursed again by a gypsy witch who sends a young girl to seduce him and then bite him with the skull of a wolf while he’s sleeping.

I kind of love the alternate title for this, The Black Harvest of Countess Dracula, which really has nothing to do with this story at all. But the real joy of this is one of its taglines: “Damn the Exorcist! The Devil won’t let go!”

Insane murderers on the loose, Satanism, beheadings, gore, bad dubbing, Daninsky as a rich nobleman and witchfinder, more gore and, yes, the flesh that you expect when you watch a Naschy movie.

There’s nothing like a movie starting with the beheading of a Satanic knight and ending with Bathory being reborn from her grave to engage a werewolf in combat. Pure magic.

You can watch this on Daily Motion.

The Lewton Bus is also known as the Cat Scare. You may also know it as the Jump Scare. It’s that moment in so many horror movies where tension is raised and built and then, when it seems like the heroine is about to be attacked, a cat will hiss or the brakes of a bus will loudly intrude into your senses. It’s the sound and fury of tension being released. It is pretty much everything horror has that takes the anxiety of the outside world and releases it.

Speaking of tension, Cat People is a movie packed with it. For 1942, it’s an incredibly prurient film. Serbian-born fashion illustrator Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) is so convinced that she’s descended from werecats that she holds back the passion that her husband and marriage demands, pushing him into the arms of another woman.

It’s the first movie that producer Val Lewton — just leaving his deal with producer David Selznick — would make for RKO pictures. While these movies were modestly budgeted, Lewton was able to assemble a team to make the films that he wanted to make. With director Jacques Tourneur, writer DeWitt Bodeen, screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen and editor Mark Robson — the creator of the aforementioned Lewis Bus — he would go on to make deeply personal tales hidden in the guise of the B picture.

The studio had come up with the title and told Lewton to make a movie of it. He told Bodeen that he was unhappy with the title already and “”if you want to get out now, I won’t hold it against you.” But the writer dug into the history of cats within horror and worked to make a movie less about vampires and monsters, more about psychological terror and the unseen. Yet Lewton also told his team, “if you’re going to have horror, the audience must be able to identify with the characters in order to be frightened.”

Irena is first glimpsed sketching the panthers in a New York City zoo. There, she meets and falls for Oliver Reed (Kent Smith). Over tea, she explains to him how she is descended from a village that turned to witchcraft and devil-worship after being enslaved by the Mameluks. While King John would drive the Mameluks out, when he learned that villagers had gone wild, he had them killed. Yet only the wisest and most evil of them escaped. Oliver laughs it off, but Irena believes this legend.

Despite the fact that cats hiss in her presence and just her touch kills a bird, Oliver marries Irena. But soon, the fact that she will not consummate their marriage — that passion would awaken the beast within — he’s pushed into the arms of Alice Moore (Jane Randolph). This is where the Lewton jump scares come from in the film, as Irena continues to stalk Alice through the streets and, even more famously, the claustrophobic pool of the Royal Palms Hotel.

Despite costing $135,000, Cat People made $1 million back in rentals, leading to RKO asking for a sequel. We’ll get to The Curse of the Cat People later this week, a side story in a way that is superior to this film. The Seventh Victim would also bring back Tom Conway’s Dr. Judd character — despite him being seemingly killed in this movie — as he tries to help another woman who seeks the embrace of death.

The shadowy tone of this film and the idea of a woman who is filled with animalistic passion — and the ability to become an animal — became a trope of its own in other films released in the wake of this movie. They include Cry of the Werewolf, Jungle Woman, The Soul of a Monster, Cult of the Cobra, The She-Creature, She-Wolf of London and more.

The driven Lewton would go on to make ten more movies for RKO in four years, including I Walked With a Zombie, Isle of the Dead and Ghost Ship. The dark tones of his films led to two of them — the Tourneur-directed The Seventh Victim and The Leopard Man — ending up on the list of the Church of Satan’s approved films. As for Tourneur, he would go on to create another landmark black and white horror epic, Night of the Demon (which also appears on the above list).

Cat People’s influenced every horror movie that would come after. Perhaps the most obvious devotee was Curtis Harrington, whose Night Tide takes the idea of a woman convinced she is from another world to the boardwalk carnival, and his TV movie The Cat Creature, a tribute that even features Kent Smith in its cast.

You can get this movie from the Criterion collection.

As a kid, I’d see a title like She-Wolf of London and prepare myself for lupine madness, only to be angered by the fact that there is not a single werewolf in this movie. Imagine how angry I am as an adult when I watch films like The Wolf of Wall Street!

Years before Lassie and Lost In Space, June Lockhart would play the title character. There’s been a series of murders at a local park and her relatives inform her that because the blood of a werewolf runs in the family and that she is responsible for the deaths. Not Maureen Robinson!

As our heroine begins to worry that she is the next to suffer the Curse of the Allenbys, her aunt both tries to help and worry her at the same time. I smell gaslighting! Can you smell gaslighting? Because I totally can.

Sara Haden, who plays Aunt Martha Winthrop, is perhaps best known for playing another movie aunt, Aunt Milly Forrest in thirteen Andy Hardy films.

This was directed by Jean Yarbrough, who also brought us Hillbillys in a Haunted House and Jack and the Beanstalk, one of only two movies that Abbott and Costello made in color (the other is Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd).

Following his near-fatal heart attack in 1991, Paul Naschy made this werewolf film in an attempt at a comeback, but it was poorly distributed and received bad reviews. He’s still playing the cursed Waldemar Daninsky, who is still a werewolf but growing old. Only the love of a pure woman can end his curse. Until then, he’s going to keep killing everyone he can. But now, a serial killer is competing with him for victims.

This film doesn’t score as well with lovers of these films. Perhaps because it’s talky. It doesn’t have much gore. Because it’s a morality story. Or probably because the werewolf doesn’t show up for a long time while female scientists and ghosts talk and talk and Naschy has heart issues.

However, just when I was ready to check out, there’s a scene where a crazy dubbed voice starts making evil phone calls and I was all in.

Sure, it’s a somewhat sanitzied Naschy film with strange bluesy soundtrack choices. It’s still better than watching what passes for the news.

Producer Milton Subotsky — all hail Amicus! — bought the rights to Cat People from RKO and began developing a remake, with the rights going to Universal eventually. Roger Vadim was going to be the director with Alan Ormsby and Bob Clark — all hail Children Shouldn’t Play With Death Things — working on several versions of the script.

Paul Schrader ended up making this, making a movie that is way more sexual — man, understatement of the year — than the film that inspired it.

Irena (Nastassja Kinski) and Paul (Malcolm McDowell) Gallier have been separated since their parents died. He’s now involved in a church in New Orleans and lives with his housekeeper Female (Ruby Dee), but has gone missing.

Of course, panther attacks start happening — look out Lynn Lowry (I Drink Your Blood, The Crazies) — and zoologists Oliver Yates (John Heard), Alice Perrin (Annette O’Toole) and Joe Creigh (Ed Begley Jr.) are on the case. They capture the panther, who Irena finds herself attracted to. If you think that this is the end of the animal and human sexual attraction in this film, well, stay tuned.

Joe ends up getting mauled by the panther, which disappears just as Paul reappears to make a Flowers In the Attic move on his sister. Oh yeah — that’s when we find out that his basement is filled with the remains of people, so everyone thinks the big cat belongs to him.

Oh man — where do we go now? We find out that in the mythology of this movie, any time one of these catpeople do the horizontal mambo with a human they turn into a cat and can only become human again by killing another person. Mama and papa Gallies were siblings because werecats are ancestrally incestuous and — oh yeah — only aardvarking between two catpeople doesn’t cause a transformation. So Paul tries to get with his sister again, just in time for Oliver to save her and her to shoot her brother.

This movie ends in perhaps the most insane way possible. Irena begs to be with her kind, so Paul ties her up and dips the stinger in the honey, as it were, until she transforms back into a panther, at which point he donates her to the zoo.

Holy cow, movies were absolutely insane in 1982. Wow and the soundtrack! Bowie and Giorgio Moroder? You can not get more absolutely 80’s than that. Oh yeah — and another RKO movie was remade in 1982. The Thing. Both failed at the box office, but only one is remembered quite so fondly.

You can get this on blu ray from Shout! Factory.

Despite being 54 years old and already surviving one heart attack, Paul Naschy took on the heavy burden of playing multiple monsters in this film, as he appears as Frankenstein’s Monster, Mr. Hyde, Phantom of the Opera, Quasimodo, The Devil and the humans Hector and Alex Doriani. Oh yes — and Waldemar Daninsky, El Hombre Lobo!

For a long time, this movie was never officially released. Before the death of one of its producers, it was to have a lavish budget. It’s better than Naschy usually got, which gives him ample time to get into makeup and play multiple roles. It also got better talent, including Howard Vernon (Dr. Orloff!) and Caroline Munro (Starcrash).

Mostly, Naschy plays Hector, a horror actor devoted to living a carnal life that he compares to de Sade, Gilles de Rais, Vlad Tepes and Jack the Ripper. Each night, Vernon brings him a new prostitute and he dresses up in complicated horror makeup. As you do.

Meanwhile, he’s raising his brother’s son Alex (or Adrian, depending on the translation, played by Naschy’s son Sergio Molina) ever since his sibling killed himself. He may have been helped by the fact that his wife was cheating on him with his own brother. And since he overdosed on heroin, Alex is with Hector, yet lost in his own world of monsters, which is where we get to see Daninsky.

Oh and meanwhile again, there’s a priest in love with a servant girl (Munro) who left him in the past. He pays a homeless man to spy on her and bring him back under penalty of her death. And while all that’s going on, a giallo-style killer is offing people on the grounds of Hector’s estate. And beyond all that — so much is happening! — Alex is trying to bring his father back from the dead.

Imagine Godzilla’s Revenge about Universal Monsters but with the budget and insanity of a Naschy movie and you’ll see why I loved this so much.

The end of this movie — I don’t want to give anything away — somehow has an actor known for Jess Franco movies getting treated like a Lucio Fulci character in a conclusion that somehow makes this an Omen ripoff by way of The Beyond‘s running to nowhere conclusion. It is truly the Dagwood sandwich of sleazy horror scum and I — pun intended — wolfed down every bite.

You can watch this on YouTube.

So this rock band, led by a man known only as Tony, comes back to his old college to win back his ex-girl Rosemary, but the band Neowolf gets in the way. Soon, people are turning up dead and yes, werewolves come on the scene. Bark at the moon, indeed.

Director Yvan Gauthier took his name off this, so he’s listed as Alan Smithee.

This is probably the most interesting part of this movie: The sex scene with Rosemary is not actress Heidi Johanningmeier, but a body double hired by producers months after the film wrapped. That happens all the time, except that no body double credit is on the film and Johanningmeier went to the Screen Actors Guild and won her case.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime and Tubi.