It’s time.
Evening approaches. The sun is setting. It’s time to start counting treats and perhaps playing a few tricks. In other words, it’s time to put on your Silver Shamrock masks and gather around the television….
(Actually, its seem like Silver Shamrock would have more success if they had a bigger online presence but I guess they like to do things the old-fashioned way….)
In the 1968 film, Targets, Boris Karloff gave one of his final performances. It was also one of his best.
Karloff played an aging horror actor named Byron Orlok, a role that was based on Karloff himself. Though once a huge star, Orlok’s style of horror has gone out of fashion. As he explains it, the real world has gotten so scary that his horror films are now tame by comparison. In this scene, Orlok proves that he can still give a compelling performance when he recites a short story about death and fate.
Reportedly, Karloff did this scene in one take and received a standing ovation after director Peter Bogdanovich called cut.
From George Romero’s 1978 film, Dawn of the Dead.
To be honest, if I was a zombie, I would probably want to go shopping too.
For our next horror scene that I love, we have one of the greatest horror endings of all time.
As Lucio Fulci’s 1979 masterpiece, Zombi 2, comes to a close, Ian McCulloch and Tisa Farrow are on a boat. They’ve managed to escape from an island that been overrun by zombies. However, as they listen to a New York radio station, they discover that the zombie outbreak is not over. In fact, it’s just begun!
And then you get the final scene, in which hundreds of zombies are seen stumbling into New York!
Enjoy the end of the world!
Who doesn’t love a good ghost story?
From John Carpenter’s 1980 film, The Fog….
(That’s John Houseman telling the story, by the way)
From 1973’s The Wicker Man.
Christopher Lee always cited Lord Summerisle as being his favorite of all the “horror” roles that he played. Interestingly enough, Lord Summerisle is not a vampire or a mummy or in any way a member of the undead. He’s just an extremely pragmatic pagan, doing what he has to do preserve his power.
In this scene, Lord Summerisle meets and speaks with Sgt. Howie (Edward Woodward), who is not at all happy with Summerisle’s style of leadership.
