Sinister Cinema is back with their third collection of classic horror trailer goodness. Overall, it’s a fun mix of genres, decades, and stars. (Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, and Christopher Lee all appear.) It also clocks in at under ninety minutes and moves along at a relatively brisk pace. The occasional appearance of drive-in snipes, concession stand ads, and spook show trailers also help to perk things up along the way.
William Castle’s filmography is the focus of the first batch of trailers (House on Haunted Hill, Macabre, and I Saw What You Did). Castle himself is even prominently featured in the previews for 13 Ghosts and The Night Walker. This stretch culminates in the nightmarish, atmospheric, and effective trailer for the Castle-produced Rosemary’s Baby.
Next up is a string of trailers for films from Hemisphere Pictures (Vampire People, Mad Doctor of Blood Island, and Brides of Blood). We also get a lot of ads for double features, such as I Drink Your Blood and I Eat Your Skin, The Fog and Phantasm, The Velvet Vampire and Scream of the Demon Lover, and even a triple feature of The Vampire, The Return of Dracula, and The Monster That Challenged the World. In addition, there’s a run of Hammer trailers (House of Fright, The Terror of the Tongs, and The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb) as well as a trio of German Edgar Wallace adaptations (The Phantom of Soho, The Monster of London City, and The Devil’s Daffodil).
Other highlights include: Veronica Lake slumming in Flesh Feast (“What’s the matter? Don’t you like my little maggots?”), The Eyes of Hell (which is nothing more than a spinning hypno-wheel accompanied by the voice of an obnoxious narrator), the trailer for Chamber of Horrors showcasing “The Fear Flasher” and “The Horror Horn” gimmicks, and the preview for Voodoo Heartbeat, which is unfortunately considered a lost film. It all concludes with the hilarious trailer for Nightwing (that compares the movie to Close Encounters of the Third Kind!?!), which is about as good as a closer as they come.
In case you’re wondering, the complete line-up is as follows: House on Haunted Hill, Macabre, 13 Ghosts, The Night Walker, I Saw What You Did, Let’s Kill Uncle, Rosemary’s Baby, the double feature of I Drink Your Blood and I Eat Your Skin, Vampire People (AKA: The Blood Drinkers), Mad Doctor of Blood Island, Brides of Blood, Brain of Blood, Blood Demon, The Phantom of Terror (AKA: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage), Flesh Feast, The Oracle, Trick or Treat, The Tempter (AKA: The Antichrist), a double feature of The Fog and Phantasm (two trailers all told), Dawn of the Dead, The Velvet Vampire and Scream of the Demon Lover, Eyeball, Seizure, Curucu: Beast of the Amazon, The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake, Horrors of Spider Island, a triple feature of The Vampire, The Return of Dracula, and The Monster That Challenged the World, House of Fright (AKA: The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll), The Terror of the Tongs, The Eyes of Hell, The Devil’s Daffodil, The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb, The Phantom of Soho, The Monster of London City, Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte, Chamber of Horrors, The Sorcerers, The Naked Witch, Beast of the Yellow Night, Voodoo Heartbeat, The Gore Gore Girls, The Vampires Night Orgy, Devil Times Five, The Omen, Meat Cleaver Massacre, Piranha, and Nightwing.
