EDITOR’S NOTE: Spiritism was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, July 1, 1967 at 1:00 a.m.

Benito also directed Munecos Infernales, Santo vs. the Zombies and the astoundingly titled Frankenstein el Vampiro y Compania. This time, he’s sending his movie up north where Espiritismo will become Spiritism thanks to K. Gordon Murray.

This goes the Monkey’s Paw one better by having Satan himself grant the wishes. I mean, when the Lord of Lies is giving things away, that’s when you start questioning things. Louis and Mary Howard (Nora Veryan and Louis Fernandez) decide to attend a seance with a medium by the name of Elvira (Diana Ochoa). She warns them that April 8 will be the start of tragedy and seeing as how that’s their 20th anniversary, they suddenly get concerned and soon are dealing with death, spirits and the decimation of their family.

This movie features a character so clueless that she goes to a seance for herself, which sounds like a joke I should be saving for the next time someone wants to play The Dozens against me. Actually, the scene where she discovers that she is dead and can’t believe it is incredibly sad.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Haunted Strangler was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, June 27, 1964 at 4:00 p.m. and Sunday, September 13, 1964 at 11:15 p.m.

Jan Read wrote the story “Stranglehold” just for Boris Karloff, who made this movie at the same time as Fiend Without a Face, the movie that it played double features with.

Edward Styles (Michael Atkinson) is executed for being the Haymarket Strangler, a killer who choked women with one arm while stabbing them. As his coffin is closed, someone slips a knife in and for twenty years, no one thinks of these crimes.

James Rankin (Boris Karloff) believes that Styles was innocent and begins to look into the crime. As he killed his last victim, Martha Stuart, at the Judas Hole bar — The Judas Hole is an alternate title, as is The Grip of the Strangler — as others watched, including singer Cora Seth (Joan Kent). A man named Tenant did the autopsies of the victims and grew ill before the end of the case. This makes Rankin think that he could be the killer but without the murder weapon, it’s hard to put the evidence together. No one can find Tenant, who went insane just after the murders.

Ready for the spoiler?

As Rankin looks at the bones of Styles, he finds the knife and begins to transform, his face changing and his arm being paralyzed like the strangler. Somehow, thanks to the love of his nurse — and wife — Barbara (Elizabeth Allan) he has been able to keep the Strangler inside himself. Now, as he investigates the case, he alternates between the two different personas and begins to kill again, including his wife. This drives him further into psychosis and he begins screaming that he is the killer yet no one believes him. As he attempts to kill his daughter Lily (Diane Aubrey), he finally realize he must be stopped. As he tries to bury the knife in the grave, he is shot and killed by the police.

Director John Croydon was also shooting First Man Into Space at the same time, so British drive-in films were in great demand. He kept directing the whole way until 1991 with the TV movie Fire: Trapped on the 37th Floor. He also made She, Corridors of Blood and The Green Man.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Wolf Man was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, September 18, 1965 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, May 13, 1967 at 11:20 p.m., Saturday, April 13, 1968 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, March 29, 1969 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, November 6, 1971 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, February 17, 1973 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, January 19, 1974 at 11:30 p.m., Saturday, September 10, 1977 at 11:30 p.m. and on the final Chiller Theater on December 31, 1983 at 1:00 a.m. with It Came from Beyond Space.

As you watch this movie, understand the pains that Lon Chaney Jr. had to go through for your entertainment. While the stories got exaggerated over the years, even a portion of their truth is a testament to the actor’s herculean patience. Although the effects improved with each movie, this makeup — which was originally developed for Werewolf of London — took five to six hours to apply and a full hour to remove. There were even “finishing nails” carefully hammered into the skin on the sides of the actor’s hands so that they would remain motionless during the transformation scenes, which took ten hours of Chaney getting makeup, going to set to hold still against a pane of glass, then back for more makeup on a day that stretched to twenty-one hours of work over two days of filing.

Larry Talbot has returned to Wales to make peace with his father, Sir John Talbot (Claude Rains) and falls for a local girl (Evelyn Ankers, Universal’s “Queen of the B’s”).

During their initial meeting, he buys a silver-headed walking stick decorated with a wolf just to get to talk to her while she works. She tells him that it depicts a werewolf, a fact of life that he learns all about when he defends her friend from an attack and gets bitten on the chest as a result.

Soon, he learns from the fortune teller Maleva (Maria Ouspenskaya) that it was her son Bela (Bela Lugosi!) who bit him. Now, he will live up to the poem that is recited several times during this film: “Even a man who is pure in heart, and says his prayers by night; May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.”

The funny thing is that poem is not an ancient tale; it was written for the movie by screenwriter Curt Siodmak. He based the chasing of Talbot and his life being thrown upside down on his experiences in post-WW II Germany.

Director George Waggner would go on to direct plenty of TV, including episodes of Batman and Cheyenne.

While this film was a success and Larry Talbott (with Chaney playing him) would return for four more films, the character never appeared in its own direct sequel. Joe Johnston would direct a 2010 remake with Benicio del Toro in the lead role. There was also talk that the character would be played by Dwayne Johnson in the planned Dark Universe and Ryan Gosling in a Blumhouse version of the film.

Most of the legends of werewolves come not from folklore but directly from this film, including a person becoming a werewolf through a bite, the weakness to silver bullets, and werewolves’ and their victims’ hands being marked with pentagrams.

Fun fact: A five-year-old Sam asked every child in his kindergarten class to show their palms, as he had told his teacher that he was doing a magic trick for the class. In truth, he was checking to see if any of them were werewolves.

Mutilator may not have the fanbase of other slashers — you won’t find much merchandise or an aisle devoted to it in your Spirit Halloween store — but it does have a great tagline in “By sword, by pick, by axe, bye bye” and the legend that the original was almost unreleased because the gore earned it an X rating.

Now, four decades after this late in the game slasher came out, original director Buddy Cooper returns with much of the cast of the first movie, all to make a meta sequel as a sequel is being made at the original filming location, as well as a wrap party and fan convention to celebrate the end of a rough shoot. Ruth Martinez, Pam from the 1985 film, plays herself, as does Bill Hitchcock (Ralph).

After Jon (Mark Francis), the director of the new Mutilator is killed, a detective named Columbo (Damian Maffei) starts to investigate and the bodies pile up. I mean it, the last part of this movie wipes out nearly every new character one after the other. Somehow, Jon’s producer brother Julian (Dan Grogan) is able to convince the police to not investigate until the wrap party.

Terry Kiser — who played the dead Bernie twice — is actor Jack Chatham, the man who played Big Ed in the first movie (who has a cameo) and he’s obsessed with getting his hands on his old weapons.

Speaking of those weapons, all of them and more will be used to decimate this movie’s cast, including fishing tackle taking out an eyeball in a method that Fulci would savor and a speargun up the rear and out the mouth kill that blew my mind, as well as a lynching that was so disgusting that I forgot I was on mute during a work conference call and yelled out loud in excitement. A fish even gets pulled off the wall and used.

Despite having eleven writers — Cooper, John Douglass, Edmund Ferrell, Keith Ferrell, Semone Fournillier, Ann Hale, Marshall New, David Edward Roop, the Soska sisters and Keith Patrick Stoddard — once it comes time to end this movie, it does so Porky Pig-style as the credits start to run.

It’s a shame that this ends in such a ramshackle fashion, just as things are picking up. Then again, this would be a fun movie to see with an audience and it revels in its gore, which is both amusing and shocking. If you love Mutilator, you’ll be overjoyed that other people love it just as much as you. But if you adore it that much, you’ll be upset that the “Fall Break” song doesn’t play in this.

This was one of the movies I was most looking forward to in several fests this year, so I’m excited that I finally got to see it. Here’s hoping it gets another pass before it plays wide, as with some tweaking, I think this could get in front of even more viewers than its inspiration.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The I Hope You Suffer podcast said that “Since everybody is doing these movie challenges now, we made the only one worth doing.” Bring the pain.

Is Amityville Cornfield a better title? I don’t know. Nor can I comprehend how one family can have so many unmatching accents, but if I have learned anything, it’s don’t watch sixty Joe D’Amato movies in a week followed by three Amityville movies because you start to see the world as a very weird place. Don’t follow my path.

Tina and Mary are sisters who can’t agree on what to do with the land their mother gave them when she died, land that could never grow corn and was probably haunted and will surely end everyone’s lives. Then again, Tina did steal Mary’s husband, so you can understand why they are fighting.

There’s a scarecrow that gets possessed by the spirit of a child-touching handyman so…you know, I guess there’s an Elm Street in Amityville. That said, the scarecrow looks pretty scary in a few scenes, which is more than you can usually expect from these films.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: My World Dies Screaming was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, May 9, 1964 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, July 16, 1966 at 11:20 p.m. and Saturday, August 2, 1969 at 1:00 a.m. under the title Terror In the Haunted House. That was its TV title, which was used as part of the 22 film Allied Artists Sci-Fi for the 60s package.

Sheila Wayne (Cathy O’Donnell) has just married Phillip Justin (Gerald Mohr). She’s spent the last 17 years in Switzerland, a place where she had nightmares of a Florida mansion where the mad Tierney family once lived. It’s been abandoned for — you knew it — 17 years. At least that’s what the caretaker, Jonah Snell (John Qualen), says when Phillip drives Sheila to the door, telling her it will be their new home. She freaks out, but just as you’d figure, the car breaks down before they can leave.

Sheila has been dreaming of this place for years and remembers that a tree says SW+PT. When she looks at the actual tree, that is carved into it. When Mark Snell (William Ching) visits, he calls her Ms. Tierney and that’s when she starts to put it all together. Phillip is PT, Phillip Tierney. He tells her that the two years she spent in a hospital as a child were to forget what happened in this house, but if she goes into the attic, she will be cured. She refuses.

Jonah tells her that Matthew Tierney – Philip’s grandfather – killed his sons Lawrence and Samuel in the attic with an axe. This makes Phillip, Samuel’s son, the last of the Tierneys. Or maybe not, as Mark accuses them of gaslighting her. That’s when she finally goes to the attic and remembers that Jonah is Mark’s father and that he killed everyone out of jealousy, then paid for Sheila and her family to go to Switzerland for treatment. Mark ends up killing him before he can tell her, but after he battles Phillip, he gets stabbed on his own axe.

This was originally filmed with the Precon Process — called Psychorama — which used subliminal messages and exaggerated supraliminal symbols. Only one other movie, A Date With Death, uses Psychorama. However, most of the subliminals are edited out of the versions that are available today. In Kevin Heffernan’s Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business 1953–1968, the messages are described as “…single frame, hidden images such as skulls, knives, and spelled words like death designed to trigger the audience’s emotional responses. These subliminal imprints remain below the level of consciousness of the viewer, supposedly causing a palpable but unexplainable dread and horror.” He also claims that other messages include “a devil face, a bug-eyed face, a skull (in red), a cobra head and the message “scream bloody murder.””

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Hands of a Stranger was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, July 10, 1965 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, October 25, 1969 at 1:00 a.m.

Concert musician Vernon Paris’ hard work has finally paid off. He’s become the biggest star there is. That’s when his hands are ruined in an auto accident and Dr. Gil Harding amputates them — with no authority — and replaces them with the hands of a murderer, all in the hopes that Paris can play piano again. Sure, the transplant is a success, but Paris becomes unhinged and increasingly violent toward those he blames for him needing his killer new mitts.

Sure, this is based on the 1920 novel Les Mains d’Orlac by French writer Maurice Renard, but the real draw is the absolutely over the top slasher like violence — well, as good as it gets in 1962 — throughout the film. First, Paris argues with his former girlfriend Eileen, who can’t love him as a normal man and craves the limelight that dating him gave her. Her dress catches on fire as they fight and she burns alive. Later, Skeet, the son of the taxi driver who caused the accident, enrages Victor by being able to play the piano when he cannot. He crushes the child’s hands, then smashes his head open.

Keep your eyes peeled for a very young Sally Kellerman and Irish McCalla, who was TV’s Sheena: Queen of the Jungle. This isn’t a great movie, per se, but it’s over the top and filled with brimming menace. It’s also anything but boring!