Martha and Andrew Alcott (Carolyn Jones, forever Morticia Adams, and Steve Forrest, Greg from Mommie Dearest) spend their summer in a vacation home that Martha hates, but there are plenty of reasons for that, mostly that there’s an evil force in the basement that wants to destroy them.

This episode of Circle of Fear/Ghost Story was directed by Leo Penn, whose acting and directing career started in 1945 and continued all the way to 1995. Despite him making 27 episodes of Matlock, 6 Hart to Hart shows and The Dark Secret of Harvest Home, he’s probably better known for being the father of Chris, Michael and Sean Penn.

This episode comes from a story by British writer A. M. Burrage and was adapted by Seeleg Lester (a story consultant on The Outer Limits and the writer of the episode “The Inheritors”) and Richard Matheson.

Over and over, Martha has a dream where she finds out that her husband is cheating, so she pushes him down a well, only to wake up and nothing has happened. Again, again and again. Is this a memory, a premonition or just a dream?

Sadly, this is one of the episodes of the show that just kind of drags. But don’t give up, because there are some decent ones coming soon.

However, it looks gorgeous, and that’s probably because Bill Butler was the director of photography. Perhaps you’ve seen his work in Jaws, Damien: Omen II and Demon Seed.

You can watch this on YouTube.

If you’ve watched enough made-for-TV horror, you may have asked, “How long will it be until Karen Black shows up as part of Ghost Story?” Good news. She’s here.

In this episode — written by John McGreevey (The Death of Richie) and horror master Richard Matheson and directed by Walter Doniger, who made a lot of TV but I’m going to celebrate him for writing the Brian Bosworth vehicle Stone Cold — she plays Barbara Sanders, a widow who is just getting used to the idea that her husband died in Vietnam, which is a tremendously edgy thing for a network TV horror anthology to tackle back in 1972.

As she plans to remarry, the phone starts to ring, with her dead husband’s voice on the other side, asking her to remember her promise and telling her that she’ll soon die. Throw in the sound of army boots haunting her at night and you get what you want Karen Black to do: open up those gigantic eyes and just start screaming.

Anyone else would scream loudly and act slightly afraid.

When you hire Karen Black, you get full-on mania, the kind you’re worried will stay with her long after the acting is done.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Not only did Eiji Tsuburaya co-create Godzilla, he was the man who brought us Ultraman. His Tsuburaya Productions continues to own the rights to the various Ultra series that have spun off from the original show such as Ultraman Gaia, Ultraman Dyna, Ultraman 80 and The Ultraman.

Tsuburaya considered this series his best work, as it was about people, rather than vehicles and special effects. He was inspired by the word of Gerry Anderson and sadly, the public didn’t watch the show as much until the second show, Fight! Mighty Jack, added aliens and monsters.

How much did Tsuburaya love this show? The Mighty Jack team logo is the same logo for Tsuburaya Productions.

Mighty Jack is a team of special agents that was put together to fight the evil Q — hey, how weird is that? — that is using hot ice to create weapons to take over the world. How can ice that doesn’t melt destroy humanity? Is that any stranger than the real Q — or unreal Q — which has convinced people that long-dead political leaders are ready to come back and stand for values that are the exact opposite of any they held in their real life?

Might Jack is also the name of their incredible flying submarine. But all we’re getting over here is epsiode one and six of the TV show, edited by Sandy Frank Productions, and making no sense. These kinds of movies allowed me to see plenty of cool Japanese series in my youth but as an adult, I realize that I’m only getting a remixed version of something that is much better in its original form. So I can either explore it more or laugh at it and I’d rather choose to always learn more.

Don McDougall started his directing career in 1951 and worked on everything there was to make on TV. Cowboys shows like Cowboy G-Men, Rawhide, Bonanza, Buffalo Bill Jr. and The Roy Rogers Show. Adventure like Jungle Jim and Mod Squad. Pop culture milestones like the Planet of the Apes, Spider-Man, Kolchak and Star Trek. Even The Dukes of Hazzard and The Fall Guy.

For this episode of the stories of Winston Essex, he’s directing from a script by The Phoenix creator Anthony Lawrence and master of horror Richard Matheson.

Paul Dover (James Franciscus) has the worst dreams. The worst is the one where his daughter Emily gets murdered when she grows up. So he follows the clues of his dream and ends up in the city where he believes she’ll die. His mission takes a backseat to the love he finds with Julie (Meg Foster!), who runs the boardinghouse he’s living in and is engaged to the man who murders Emily in Paul’s nightmares.

These dreams have already cost Paul his marriage to Karen (Elizabeth Ashley, Windows) and left him with darkness hanging over him after he doesn’t follow those psychic warnings when he believed his father’s life was in danger. So when he sees a vision of Emily getting shot on a carousel by a man not yet born, then you understand why he wants to break up Julie and Ed, who will one day give birth to that killer.

This is one of the better episodes of this show and, as always, Sebastian Cabot is perfect as the storyteller.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This occult-heavy made for TV movie first was on our site on February 1, 2020. Beware man’s best friend who walks the left hand path.

Curtis Harrington knew all about the occult, thanks to his friendships with Marjorie Cameron and Kenneth Anger. This made-for-TV movie, which originally aired on CBS on October 31, 1978, is all about a suburban family who just wants to have a nice dog and ends up with a Satanic pooch.

Ah man, made-for-TV movies are where it’s at. Seriously, what a magical time to be alive, when these movies just blasted their way into your home via network TV.

As featured in our Ten Horror Movie Dogs article, this movie tells the story of the Barry family — Mike (Richard Crenna!), Betty (Yvette Mimieux, Jackson County Jail, The Black Hole) and their kids Bonnie and Charlie (played by aunt of Paris Hilton Kim Richards and Ike Eisenmann, who were in the Witch Mountain movies) — get a new German Shepherd from a fruit vendor after theirs dies in an accident.

Sired in a Satanic ceremony to make the world think that evil will triumph, this lil’ mutt is soon killing maids and making Mike try to stick his hand into a lawnmower, which seems like small potatoes for the hound of Hell. Somehow, the dog also makes a shrine to the First of the Fallen in the basement and shrugs off some gunshots.

Mike goes the whole way to Ecuador — as you do — where Victor Jory, the voice of Peter Pan records, teaches him how to imprison the canine’s soul for a thousand years.

Ken Kercheval — Cliff Barnes from Dallas — is in here, as are R. G. Armstrong (who was also menaced by the Devil in The Car, Race With the Devil and Evilspeak, which is some kind of record), Martine Beswick (who catfought with Racquel Welch in One Million Years B.C., played Bond girls in From Russia With Love and Thunderball, played Xaviera Hollander in The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington and was Sister Hyde in Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde) and Warren Munson, who played an admiral in Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan and Uncle Bill in Ed and His Dead Mother.

Red Devil Dog

• 1.5 oz. vodka
• 1.5 oz. peach schnapps
• 1.5 oz. Southern Comfort
• 1.5 oz. gin
• 1.5 oz. triple sec
• 3 oz. orange juice
• Splash of grenadine

1. Shake all the ingredients with ice in a shaker.
2. Pour over ice and bark at a car.

When I was a kid in the 70s, killer bees were all we heard of. They were obviously going to get us and a story on the news every night for years and then, well…nothing ever happened.

The ABC Movie of the Week on February 26, 1974, The Killer Bees, directed by Curtis Harrington and written by former lawyer John William Corrington and his wife Joyce Hooper, who teamed to write the scripts for  Von Richthofen and Brown, The Omega Man, Boxcar Bertha, The Arena and Battle for the Planet of the Apes, as well as several soap operas and the syndicated show Superior Court.

Edward Van Bohlen (Edward Albert) has stayed away from his wine making family until his girlfriend Victoria Wells (Kate Jackson) asks him to go back home and try to reconnect. We all know that you can’t go home again and when your family uses African bees to make your wine better, well, you really should in no way go back home again.

Madame Van Bohlen (Gloria Swanson) not only runs the family and the winery, but the bees as well. She’s able to command them to kill everyone that she sees as a threat, but when she dies, who will the bees follow?

Bette Davis was originally going to be the star of the movie, but her doctor worried that she’d o into anaphylactic shock if she was stung by a bee. As for Gloria Swanson, she was so game for this movie that she agreed to have bees put all over her body. To create this moment, the bees were placed in a dry ice room to make them tired, then gradually warmed once they were put on Ms. Swanson’s costume.

The wine that got made by the Van Bohlen’s must have been good, because their home is now the place where noted winemaker — and yes, director — Francis Ford Coppola lives.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This made for TV movie was originally on our site on May 19, 2020. As we explore the movies of Curtis Harrington, we’ve brought this article back.

Along with What’s the Matter With Helen?, this movie is one of the two collaborations between writer Henry Farrell and director Curtis Harrington.  It was the ABC Movie of the Week on September 22, 1970 and has stood the test of time as one of the better TV movies. And there’s some stiff competition for that.

Shot in just 12 days, it stars Anthony Perkins as Allan Colleigh, who has psychosomatic blindness after an accident — he left paint cans too close to a fire — that killed his abusive father and scarred his sister Katharine (Julie Harris from the 1963 version of The Haunting).

After Allan returns to their home after time in a mental hospital, he’s convinced that everyone is out to get him, including a new boarder with speaks in a hoarse whisper and one of his sister’s ex-boyfriends on the phone.

Joan Hackett — who was in two great TV movies, Dead of Night and The Possessed — appears as Allan’s former girlfriend. She gets caught up in his mania as rooms of the house explode into flames and he’s kidnapped by that mysterious ex.

How Awful About Allan has plenty of actors as comfortable on the stage as they were on the big or small screen. Perkins agreed to wear special contacts that completely made him blind so that his performance would be more realistic.

This didn’t get great reviews when it came out, but do the movies we love ever do?

You can download this on the Internet Archive, watch it on Amazon Prime or just use this YouTube link:

EDITOR’S NOTE: We’ve added some things to this article, which originally appeared on our site on May 22, 2020.  

Originally airing December 11, 1973 on ABC, this Curtis Harrington-directed, Robert Bloch-written take on Cat People was originally planned as a starring vehicle for Diahann Carroll. However, her ABC contract ended and the film needed to be rewritten.

It’s such a tribute to Cat People that Kent Smith, who starred in that film and its sequel, The Curse of the Cat People, appears.

Smith plays an appraiser who finds a sarcophagus in a house that he is surveying. Inside is a mummy wearing a solid gold cat’s head amulet that has a curse attached to it. Just then, he’s killed by a cat creature and a thief played by Keye Luke steals the amulet.

David Hedison — who played Felix Leiter to two different James Bonds — is a cop on his trail. Showing up for support are Meredith Baxter as a salesgirl,  John Carradine as a hotel clerk and Stuart Whitman as a police lieutenant.

Gale Sondergaard, who played Universal’s Spider Woman in two films*, is also here as an occult bookstore owner named Hester Black. It was one of the first movies that she had made since 1949, thanks to the blacklist and her support of her husband Herbert Biberman.

The day after shooting wrapped, she was called back for some closeups. It was all a ruse When she arrived on the set in makeup and costume, Charlton Heston presented her with an Academy gold statuette to replace one that she had won for 1936’s Anthony Adverse.

*Sherlock Holmes and the Spider Woman and The Spider Woman Strikes Back.

Want to check this out for yourself? Here it is on YouTube:

Man, Robert Bloch didn’t like this adaption, saying: “The Dead Don’t Die. Maybe they don’t, but the show did. Despite Curtis’s casting of accomplished character actors, their supporting roles couldn’t prop up the lead. And Ray Milland, who had given such a deftly paced performance in my script for Home Away from Home, merely plodded through his part here like a zombie without a deadline.”

As for me, I loved it. It’s somehow a noir movie, a Poverty Row horror film, a zombie movie and it’s made for TV. More like made for me.

George Hamilton plays Don Drake, a man who comes back from a long trip to learn that his brother fried in the chair for killing his wife, a crime that Drake thinks his brother is innocent of. He tries to clear the name of his sibling, leading him to the Loveland Ballroom, where his brother was involved in a dance marathon run by Jim Moss (Ray Milland).

The problem is, well, the dead don’t die.

Drake soon sees his brother walking the foggy streets, as well as a man he’s already killed once, Perdido (Reggie Nalder, who is in a ton of great movies like Salem’s Lot and Seven). That’s because Moss is also a master of voodoo.

Harrington had to be in heaven with this cast. Joan Blondell and Ralph Meeker may be underappreciated, but he remembered their work.

It’s like a Val Lewton movie made in 1975 and if you know me, you know what kind of praise that is.

AKA Frankenstein 95 and why does Frankenstein have so many movies with years after its name?

Obsessed with creating life, Count Victor Frankenstein starts on animals, moves up to cadavers and freaks everyone out around him — his teachers, the lcoal government and even his own family — as he dreams of getting a real person to try out his experiments on.

Man, this movie is just plain weird and nobody is talking about it, but then I realize that it’s a made for TV French movie from 1974 so adjust your perceptions, Sam.

Also, besides morally disgusting everyone he meets, the other people that Victor knows — his foster sister, a village fool — want to have steamy, sweaty and probably chemically smelling sex with him. He’s also mentally bonded with the creature, giving everyone else in town psychic visions.

Or maybe, just maybe, he’s crazy.