So, here's the deal. Last year I decided to step back from writing about comic book related stuff and change direction. I moved into writing about horror movies, their history in Australia and the impact that they had upon our society as a whole - with a focus on censorship, what was released where and when and how it was promoted and seen within our young nation. My first series, published in Monster looked at the history Frankenstein , tracing it from the very first stage performances in Tasmania in the early 1800s through to the movies and it's resurgence on television in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. I covered a lot of ground and uncovered a lot of information that, frankly, hadn't been reported anywhere before in regards to the original Karloff movie being banned for twenty one years in South Australia, censorship issues that Bride encountered and the many issues that the films came up against trying to get onto television. Along the way I was encouraged by

A slight change of pace from the usual grist.  Whilst doing some serious research for a long-term project, I came across these vintage movie ads for a few Universal Horrors.  The ads all date from the right period - that being the early 1930s through to the 1950s - and they all feature artwork that appears to be unique.   I can only imagine how it would have been heading down to the cinema in 1932 and seeing a movie such as Frankenstein or Dracula, let alone The Mummy or Freaks, movies that disturbed me when I first saw them here in Adelaide.  Every Friday evening in the winter of 1982, Channel Seven would show a midnight movie, and those movies were Universal Horrors.  In this way I was able to see classics such as Dracula, fifty years after it's release, the Frankenstein and Mummy series, the classic Lugosi/Karloff films such as The Black Cat along with lesser known movies by Lon Chaney, Jr, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and many more.  I'd sit there in the dark, watch th

I can't help but love these two items. I've always had a love for movies, old movies and in particular the old Universal Horror films and Marx Brothers, along with The Three Stooges, but that's a different story (Oh, growin' a bit of brain are ya?). Imagine my surprise and sheer delight when I picked these two gems up in Melbourne during my last two visits. The first is an original Australian press sheet announcing the release of the 1941 classic The Wolf Man. This was the film that launched Lon Chaney Jr (the studios eventually dropped the Jr part) into the horror spotlight, although he had made a fair few movies before this and would arguably give his finest performances in non-horror films such as Of Mice & Men and High Noon. Still, without the exposure that the Universal Horror films brought him he might have remained a footnote in cinema, the son of a horror great. The press sheet, although marred by two holes punched in the side, is in surprisingly good cond