Horror has its share of icons

”Horror has its share of icons: Vincent Price, Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Peter Lorre, Basil Rathbone, Lon Chaney, Lon Chaney Jr. Unfortunately the gangster brain (as is so often the case with brains) has other ideas, mostly involving the murder of all of his old cronies and keeping the loot for himself.After making the simply awful The Terror with Jack Nicholson for AIP, Karloff still owed Roger Corman two days’ work. =) Because no sparkles.Margie Carranza and her 71-year-old mother, Emma Hernandez, were delivering papers around 5 a.1. And for those keeping track, a lot of Die, Monster, Die’s climax can be traced back to Karloff’s 1936 film, The Invisible Ray.The following year brought How The Grinch Stole Christmas, and like Frankenstein, what more need be said? It’s impossible to imagine now the Grinch being voiced by anyone else. The imagery of the tomb, the literary combination of passion and death, were all subjects that were found in Whitman’s poetry. Especially Vlad the Impaler.Of all his 1931 films though, my personal favorite remains Five Star Final. . And I realized that, after all the research and all the writers and the speculation on the subject, Stokers influences still remain the most intriguing part of the story. Do people even go back and watch the whole thing anymore? It’s fast, it’s smart, and for viewers at the time it really was quite shocking. But things started turning around in ‘31 with Howard Hawks’ The Criminal Code.