Karina on SpoutBlog

If you want to stay home and watch movies on Halloween but actually getting your hands on the full slate of films on our Six Degrees of Frankenstein marathon seems like too much trouble, consider Turner Classic Movies your back-up. The channel began its 48 Hours of Horror this morning at 6:15 with a showing of Mad Love, the Peter Lorre-starring tale of fatal attraction for which I am a total nerd. Highlights coming up over the next two days include:

• William Castle’s Mr. Sardonicus (about a Baron who digs up the decomposing corpse of his dead dad to retrieve a lottery ticket, goes into shock and emerges with his face fixed in a grotesque grin), and his more famous but more gimmicky The Tingler.
• I Walked With a Zombie already played this morning, but there are two more to come from producer Val Lewton: Cat People (7:30 AM Friday) and The Body Snatcher (3:30 pm Friday). The latter features both Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, and was directed by Robert Wise.
• A clear precurson to Lewton’s work is White Zombie, starring Lugosi, which plays at 2:15 tomorrow. Kevin Buist wrote about the film in his piece on the science behind zombie fiction.
• Halloween night is devoted to four films based on the work of H.P. Lovecraft. The only one I’ve seen is Die, Monster, Die, an AIP pic from 1965 starring my classic horror boyfriend, Boris Karloff. The TCM page for this drive-in classic sums up the bizarro plot better than I ever could: “Karloff assumes the role of Nahum Witley, a paraplegic scientist whose remote estate (with an enormous crater nearby) is visited by milquetoast American Stephen Rinehart (TV’s former “Johnny Yuma” and Japanese monster stalwart Nick Adams), an old college paramour of Witley’s daughter, Susan (Suzan Farmer). The locals don’t take kindly to the Witley family, and weird vegetation seems to be growing everywhere. As it turns out, Stephen was summed by the scientist’s ailing wife (Freda Jackson), who wants her daughter to escape. A mysterious glowing greenhouse, eerie howling within the house, and malevolent vines all figure in the horrific goings-on, linked to a radioactive meteorite which threatens to consume them all.” Also, it features some of the creepiest shitty hologram effects I’ve ever seen. Check out the trailer above.

Check out the full line-up at TCM.com.