October 29, 2025 • 18 mins
George Noory and author Chris Alexander discuss the enduring appeal of horror movies, some of the stars of classic horror movies like Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, and why low budget horror movies like Night of the Living Dead remain so popular decades after they were released.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you.
Chris Alexander with Us. A Canadian author. His book is
called Art Trash Terror Adventures in Strange Cinema. He's an editor,
he's a teacher. He is a composer and producer of
the electronic music concept albums Music for Murder, Blue Eyes
of the Broken Doll, Body Double and dracul On. Chris,
(00:26):
welcome back. You are on with my buddy Rich Murr
about a year ago.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Hi, George, I've been on several times and every time
I come back it's well, it's like coming home, George.
So I appreciate you having me on and these we well,
I'm in Toronto, so the wee small hours of the morning,
it's my pleasure to be here.
Speaker 4 (00:42):
So thank you.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
We love you, buddy. How'd you get involved in cinema
like this, Well, it's.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
You know, it's from a young age. Your perspective on
the ride depends on when you get on the train.
And I was three years old and I discovered the
band Kiss in the library and Gene Simmons was my
first vampire, I think, and it's true he had a
couple of love gun was misplaced in the library and
it was in the children's section. And then that cover
of Genus has his head tilted back and he's got
fangs and there's emaciated vampire women swooning at his feet.
Speaker 4 (01:10):
So I had a double awakening. On that day.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
My grandmother took me to a wax museum in Niagara
Falls called the House of Frankenstein, which melted my mind.
And then I saw finally nineteen seventy eight's Invasion of
the Body Snatchers the Philip Coffman remake on television one night,
and that was it.
Speaker 4 (01:25):
There was no turning back. George.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
I made it my life's work to see all I
could see, learn all I could learn. And now I'm
over the half century mark, and I don't think I'm
going to change. So this is probably me until the
last breath is taken.
Speaker 4 (01:39):
I eat, sleep, and breathe this stuff. George.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
What do you think, Chris, of the old classics, the
old black and white ones and things like that, were
they well, I mean better done.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
You know it's not better done necessarily, but you know,
tip of the hat to the people that got there first,
to the founding fathers, the architects of the genre.
Speaker 4 (02:00):
You know.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
His film started as you know, many people don't even know,
but the whole dawn of cinema started on murder, bloody horror. Actually,
a British photographer named Edward Moybridge was working for a
guy named Leland Stanford, you know, the former governor of California,
and he wanted to prove a point by proving to
his cronies that his horse when it jumped, when it
(02:21):
ran down the racetrack and jumped, all four legs lifted
off the ground. So we hired this British photographer to
do this photographic experiment to prove this. And at the
same time, this British photographer, Moybridge, had found out his
wife was having an affair and he knocked on the
guy's door one day and blew his head off and
was put.
Speaker 4 (02:38):
In the slammer.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
While Stanford didn't like this, and he ended up bailing
him out and funneling all his funds to Britain to
basically buy him out of jail, bring him to California
and do this stunt. And he proved that all four
legs left the ground, So that photographic experiment was the
blueprint for film and everything kind of steamrolled from there.
Speaker 4 (02:59):
But when it comes to horror, I mean, we're.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
Talking about those early days of German expressionism in the
twenties with movies like The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari or FW.
Murnau's Nosferatu Symphony of Fear. Moving all the way back
to America with the you know, the first horror film
star Lon Cheney, who was a you know, contortionist, whould
do things with his face and his body and was
manipulating special effects makeup before anyone even knew what that was.
(03:25):
Through the nineteen thirties with Universal Pictures and their pioneering
horror films, first adaptation, first American adaptation of Bram Stoker's
Dracula in nineteen thirty one with by La Lagosi, of course,
and Boris Karloff donning Jack Pierce's makeup in the same
year in nineteen thirty one as Frankenstein. So these are
the foundations of the genre, and still the beauty of
(03:46):
these pictures are they still work today.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
In a weird, strange way.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
It's all come full circle, and now these movies that
maybe at one point what seemed antiquated now have this
kind of otherworldly, nightmarish quality that if you elect them
do their business on you, they still have the power
to scare.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
I've me in Saint Louis right now, Chris, where Vincent Price,
the great actor was born, you know, back in nineteen eleven,
and he had some really scary horror genre films.
Speaker 4 (04:17):
Well, yeah, Price, I always see listen.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
I think that if you look at the great genre films,
they always seem to attract actors who are on the
decline and young actors who are on the rise, and
they sort of meet in the middle. And this splattery
Avatar motion picture and Vincent Price. You know, by the
time early nineteen fifties, he was sort of passe. He
(04:42):
was a character actor. He hadn't done much horror. He'd
been around for a long time. He was an auto
Premeger's Laura, you know, kind of dipped his toe in
horror with the sequel.
Speaker 4 (04:51):
To The Invisible Man, The Invisible Man Returns.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
But that's not really a horror picture, but it was
in nineteen fifty three, the first three D motion picture
three D feature film studio Film House of Wax.
Speaker 4 (05:02):
That sort of reintroduced Vincent as a.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
Genre film star, and he owned the nineteen fifties, you know.
He moved on from House of Wacks to pictures like
The Fly, and then working with William Castle in crazy
pictures like The House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler,
and then Roger Corman, the great, late great, my good friend.
I wrote a book with him before he passed away
a couple of years ago. Roger Corman brought him on
(05:26):
board The Star and his ed Growland Poe pictures throughout.
Speaker 4 (05:29):
The nineteen sixties like The House of Usher and The
Pit and The Pendulum.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
So it was those movies that put Vincent on the
map as a horror film star. And at that point
Vincent had nothing left to prove, and he would choose
scenery with the best of them and almost deliver these
high opera performances in these pictures. And it's because of
those movies that we think of Vincent as the great
horror star that he was. He leaned into it, but
(05:52):
his real passions were, George, I'm sure you knew, were
art collecting and cooking, and he took a lot of
these pictures all around the world, just to fund his
passion for these two you know, art forms.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
He once said Chris that he took a cut of
the action with Michael Jackson on his Thriller video and
made a fortune, and he said it was the best
investment he ever made.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
Well, you know, Vincent, actually, George, you're kind of right there.
Speaker 4 (06:21):
It's a little bit.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
The person that brought him on board that Thriller song
was Peggy Lipton, you know, from the mod squad in
Twin Peaks, who was married to Quincy Jones. Quincy needed
somebody for Thriller to deliver that monologue, and it was
Peggy that said, look, Quincy, Vincent price, come on, man.
Speaker 4 (06:39):
So he hired Vincent to do it.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
And it's my understanding that it's the opposite there that
Vincent actually did not take a cut. He took a
one time payout, you know, again, just to fund his
operation of collecting art and learning about cooking and writing cookbooks.
And then smacked himself in the head that he screwed up,
that he wishes he had taken a cut, because obviously
(07:02):
Thriller I think to this day the highest grossing album
of all time. So which story is true, I'm not
sure but either way, that was an essential component of
Price's latter day years to reintroduce him to an entirely
new generation of young fans and a completely new demographic
in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
You could be right, I could have it reversed, but
it was one heck of a move one way or another.
Speaker 4 (07:26):
Huh yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
And then you know the video directed by John Landis,
who had previously made an American Werewolf in London, with
those great special effects by Rick Baker.
Speaker 4 (07:38):
I remember seeing that.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
When I was a little boy, and that was a
big part of my transition into more extreme horror. I mean,
that was a terrifying, terrifying little, I say little video.
I think it was thirteen minutes long, and when you're
a kid just hiding behind the couch when it popped
up on MTV with all those shambling zombies and werewolves,
I mean, that was some serious business.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
I mean, throughout some aims of some of these past
stars and tell me how their careers evolved. Let's start
with Boris Karloff. Tell me about him. Well, we all
know Boris Karlov. He's the one of the poster children
of the genre.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
With good reason. We close our eyes.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
We can see that Jack Pierce Cubist makeup on him
and James Wells Frankenstein. But what made Boris so interesting
was he was a working actor for so many years
before he took that gig in nineteen thirty one, a
British actor who wanted to follow in his brother's footsteps
and be an actor, and made his way to Canada
first and foremost. And I say that with some pride
(08:38):
because he actually landed first on a farm not too
far from me outside of Toronto, Canada, and you know,
shoveled cow dung for a year and figured well, this
isn't getting me anywhere, and went out west and applied
his trade and learned how to become an actor.
Speaker 4 (08:53):
That ended up in New York.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
You know, he'd get gigs, then he wouldn't have gigs,
he'd be up on top, and then he'd be working
in a factory on a dock somewhere. Went over to
Hollywood to try to find his way, met up with
Lon Cheney at the same time, and Cheney gave him
the advice and said, Boris, you need a gimmick man,
otherwise no one's going to remember you. So by the
time he got that job as the Monster in thirty
one that completely, irrevocably changed his fortunes.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
He was a humble guy.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
So the thing about Boris is that he was one
of the first horror superstars. But he never ever to
his dying day and he went the long haul. He
passed away in I think nineteen sixty eight, sixty nine.
But he never had an ego. He was always the
gentleman of horror because he realized that, you know, you're
huge today, you're on top today, and you're down on
(09:42):
your ass the next week. You know, whatever comes his way,
whatever came his way, he was grateful for the work,
and I think that shows in those performances.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
How about Belle Laguzzi, mister Dracioma, right.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
I mean, I mean it's obvious that there's two sides
at the coin.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
George.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
I mean, in those early days, he got Bella and
you got Boris because of Universal, you know, bringing those
two gentlemen to the forefront in the early part of
the nineteen thirties, the first two talkie horror films, Dracula
and Frankenstein simbling pictures. But I mean Bella couldn't be
more I say Boris was humble and grateful for the word.
Bella had an ego. It was a hung Hungarian actor
(10:20):
who you know, came to the stage first, couldn't really
speak the language, the English language, but he learned a
lot of his lines phonetically. He had played Dracula on stage. Actually,
some of those first few productions in New York were
directed by the aforementioned William Cassel, and a lot of
people don't know that. But by the time he came
to Hollywood and then he was much more regal, much
(10:41):
more sophisticated, playing the Count. Who was actually offered the
role of Frankenstein's Monster the year after, and he refused,
saying that he didn't want to be buried under that
makeup that you know there was beneath him.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
Now.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
He kicked himself later and wishes to god he did
later on in nineteen forty three, he did play the Monster,
none too effectively.
Speaker 4 (10:57):
And Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman. But Bella's four were never
quite as high as Boris's.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
First of all was the language barrier. He really couldn't
speak the language very well, and the roles just did
not come his way. He was usually relegated to being
a sidekick to Boris Karloff in several pictures, and the
two of them had a sort of front of me
relationship where they on the surface seemed like they got
along as colleagues, but underneath, Bella resented, seethingly resented Boris
(11:25):
Karloff's fortunes and success, and Bella's final days, as many
people know, were not as sunny as Boris' is. He
died with slave to addiction, and I think his final
film was annoble picture directed by the not so great
ed Wood plan nine from Outer Space, which he didn't
(11:45):
even really star, and it was just cobbled together from
whome movies that would have taken of Bella just before
he passed, So his final days were not as sunny
as Boris's.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Did they make any money in those days?
Speaker 3 (11:57):
Chris, Sure they made money, but you know what I mean,
the days of getting the deals, And we talked about
Vincent Price having the option to take the payout or
take the piece of the action. I mean, no one
was getting any piece of the action back then. You
were only as good as your next picture. So residuals
were not the name of the game. So in their heyday,
(12:18):
they were making money. As long as the lights were
on and the work was coming their way, cash was king.
But after those movies, you know, in those early days too,
no vhs, no television, so a movie would open theatrically
and then it would vanish into the ether, maybe be
re released if the was a big enough hit.
Speaker 4 (12:35):
If not, then it was gone.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
So when those movies were gone, so was any chance
of recouping any money from that. So as they aged
and the work started to dry up, especially in Bella's case, no,
there was no money. You know.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
Bella died impoverished. Boris, on the other hand, again, as.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
I mentioned, stayed in the game and worked and worked
and worked until his final days. I think was his
last movie was the Roger Corman produced Peter Bogdanovich art
house masterpiece Targets. So he went out with some glory
and was making money right until the end. But no,
if you were not making money off the pictures, you
made your one time shot, and if you kept working
(13:14):
you were in the chips.
Speaker 4 (13:15):
If not, now, yeah, maybe your career wasn't.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
His sunny, Well, it's Chris Alexander. His book, of course,
is called Art, Trash, Terror, Ventures and Strange cinema, and
cinema is strange. It seems like the lower budget horror
films make more money.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Chris, I always say that if look at some of
the great horror pictures in history, the ones that really
changed the game.
Speaker 4 (13:41):
And I'm talking about.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
Movies like Georgia Merrow's The Knight of the Living Dead
in Night sixty eight or yeah, you know, the Toby Hoopers,
the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and usually come from the underground,
the independence. And you don't need big stars for your
horror film to be successful. You need a great title,
a great concept, a great poster, and you need to
(14:04):
know how to push the buttons to.
Speaker 4 (14:05):
Get your audience to scream.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
And so a lot of these lower budgeted films make
money because guess what, they don't cost a lot of money.
So if you're spending less and you're keeping your production
incredibly controlled. You know, most money in Hollywood, most of
the money, as you know, goes to the stars, which
goes to the actors and the marketing. So if you're
(14:27):
not spending that money and the movies a hit, you're
just sitting back and laughing and counting the bills. You know,
Texas Chainsaw Massacre was a smash success. Night of the
Living Dead played everywhere forever. Now, the sad case in
that particular picture was George Rameirill made a mistake when
he was retitling the film from Night of the Flesh
Eaters to Night of the Living Dead and didn't put
(14:48):
a copyright notice on the film itself, so every distributor
and cinema owner bootlegged that film thinking the movie was
in the public domain. So George actually sadly never made
a dime off that movie. But the movie played forever,
and it put George on the map to have an
illustrious career all throughout the nineteen seventies eighties, right up
until he died in two thousand and thirteen. So yeah,
(15:11):
I mean, horror makes money, and if you spend a little,
your potential potentially can make a lot.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
Lon Cheney, what was his favorites?
Speaker 3 (15:21):
Lon Chaney again, one of the great actors of all time.
Speaker 4 (15:26):
We call him the first horror film actor, George, but
but that's kind of a misnomer.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
I'd say he was just you know, he was a
character actor first and foremost, a vaudevildian star who made
his name at a very young age ran away from home.
Was the child of deaf mute parents, so he learned
from a very young age to use his body his
hands to communicate effectively. So he became a master of
the vaudeville stage. When that started to dry up, he
(15:54):
was a single dad, his son Creighton Cheney, later changing
changing his name to Lawn Cheney Junior and starting in
movies like The Wolfman. They moved to la and he
became a Hollywood bit player actor. But I think I
mentioned as a pioneering special effects artist. He would walk
around with this little case with his makeup and his morticians,
wax and wires, and he would take any job that
came to him because he had to, but also because
(16:16):
he could. He'd go to the studio a lot and
they'd come out and say, okay, we need an old
Chinese fisherman. He'd say, I can do that, and two
minutes later he was a Chinese fisherman. Then he'd go
back in the lot and they'd come back on and
they say, okay, we need an eighty year old woman
with a hunchback, and he'd said, oh, I can do that,
and suddenly he was an eighty year old woman with
a hunchbag. He was the man of a thousand faces.
That literally was what they called him.
Speaker 4 (16:35):
In fact, there was an.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
Old joke going around Hollywood in the twenties that don't
step on that bug, it might be lun Cheney. He
could literally be anybody, and we call it a horror
film star because there were a few films in that
wave of movies he made in the twenties that stand
out as some of the greatest horror films of all time,
First and foremost The Hunchback of Notre Dame, where he
played Quasamoto, and most effectively, the first adaptation of gas St.
(17:00):
LaRue's Phantom of the Opera, that great unmasking scene Cheney
spins around.
Speaker 4 (17:05):
And he's the living skull. People screamed in their seats.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
He died of lung cancer, unfortunately, just as films became
talking pictures. He would have had a great career, but
he didn't make it. But his legacy speaks for itself.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Forty seven years old, that's all he was when he died.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
Yeah, yeah, and again, when you know, when movies became talkies,
when sound was introduced, ninety percent of the big stars
were out of the picture. You know. Rudolph Valentino, the
Sheikh was the Latin lover. Every lady wanted him, every man.
Speaker 4 (17:35):
Wanted to be him.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
Except when he had to speak, he sounded like Mickey Mouse,
so he was out of there.
Speaker 4 (17:40):
Lon Cheney, the Man of.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
A Thousand Faces, because he started on Vaudeville, was a
theater theatrically trained actor, so his voice he was the
man of a thousand voices too. He only made one
talking picture, The Holy Three, and he died just shortly
after the release of that film. But had he had
made had lived, he would have been you know, forget
Boris for Bella, he would have been the big horror
(18:01):
film star of the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Listen to More Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern, and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you.
Chris Alexander with Us. A Canadian author. His book is
called Art Trash Terror Adventures in Strange Cinema. He's an editor,
he's a teacher. He is a composer and producer of
the electronic music concept albums Music for Murder, Blue Eyes
of the Broken Doll, Body Double and dracul On. Chris,
(00:26):
welcome back. You are on with my buddy Rich Murr
about a year ago.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Hi, George, I've been on several times and every time
I come back it's well, it's like coming home, George.
So I appreciate you having me on and these we well,
I'm in Toronto, so the wee small hours of the morning,
it's my pleasure to be here.
Speaker 4 (00:42):
So thank you.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
We love you, buddy. How'd you get involved in cinema
like this, Well, it's.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
You know, it's from a young age. Your perspective on
the ride depends on when you get on the train.
And I was three years old and I discovered the
band Kiss in the library and Gene Simmons was my
first vampire, I think, and it's true he had a
couple of love gun was misplaced in the library and
it was in the children's section. And then that cover
of Genus has his head tilted back and he's got
fangs and there's emaciated vampire women swooning at his feet.
Speaker 4 (01:10):
So I had a double awakening. On that day.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
My grandmother took me to a wax museum in Niagara
Falls called the House of Frankenstein, which melted my mind.
And then I saw finally nineteen seventy eight's Invasion of
the Body Snatchers the Philip Coffman remake on television one night,
and that was it.
Speaker 4 (01:25):
There was no turning back. George.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
I made it my life's work to see all I
could see, learn all I could learn. And now I'm
over the half century mark, and I don't think I'm
going to change. So this is probably me until the
last breath is taken.
Speaker 4 (01:39):
I eat, sleep, and breathe this stuff. George.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
What do you think, Chris, of the old classics, the
old black and white ones and things like that, were
they well, I mean better done.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
You know it's not better done necessarily, but you know,
tip of the hat to the people that got there first,
to the founding fathers, the architects of the genre.
Speaker 4 (02:00):
You know.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
His film started as you know, many people don't even know,
but the whole dawn of cinema started on murder, bloody horror. Actually,
a British photographer named Edward Moybridge was working for a
guy named Leland Stanford, you know, the former governor of California,
and he wanted to prove a point by proving to
his cronies that his horse when it jumped, when it
(02:21):
ran down the racetrack and jumped, all four legs lifted
off the ground. So we hired this British photographer to
do this photographic experiment to prove this. And at the
same time, this British photographer, Moybridge, had found out his
wife was having an affair and he knocked on the
guy's door one day and blew his head off and
was put.
Speaker 4 (02:38):
In the slammer.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
While Stanford didn't like this, and he ended up bailing
him out and funneling all his funds to Britain to
basically buy him out of jail, bring him to California
and do this stunt. And he proved that all four
legs left the ground, So that photographic experiment was the
blueprint for film and everything kind of steamrolled from there.
Speaker 4 (02:59):
But when it comes to horror, I mean, we're.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
Talking about those early days of German expressionism in the
twenties with movies like The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari or FW.
Murnau's Nosferatu Symphony of Fear. Moving all the way back
to America with the you know, the first horror film
star Lon Cheney, who was a you know, contortionist, whould
do things with his face and his body and was
manipulating special effects makeup before anyone even knew what that was.
(03:25):
Through the nineteen thirties with Universal Pictures and their pioneering
horror films, first adaptation, first American adaptation of Bram Stoker's
Dracula in nineteen thirty one with by La Lagosi, of course,
and Boris Karloff donning Jack Pierce's makeup in the same
year in nineteen thirty one as Frankenstein. So these are
the foundations of the genre, and still the beauty of
(03:46):
these pictures are they still work today.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
In a weird, strange way.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
It's all come full circle, and now these movies that
maybe at one point what seemed antiquated now have this
kind of otherworldly, nightmarish quality that if you elect them
do their business on you, they still have the power
to scare.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
I've me in Saint Louis right now, Chris, where Vincent Price,
the great actor was born, you know, back in nineteen eleven,
and he had some really scary horror genre films.
Speaker 4 (04:17):
Well, yeah, Price, I always see listen.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
I think that if you look at the great genre films,
they always seem to attract actors who are on the
decline and young actors who are on the rise, and
they sort of meet in the middle. And this splattery
Avatar motion picture and Vincent Price. You know, by the
time early nineteen fifties, he was sort of passe. He
(04:42):
was a character actor. He hadn't done much horror. He'd
been around for a long time. He was an auto
Premeger's Laura, you know, kind of dipped his toe in
horror with the sequel.
Speaker 4 (04:51):
To The Invisible Man, The Invisible Man Returns.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
But that's not really a horror picture, but it was
in nineteen fifty three, the first three D motion picture
three D feature film studio Film House of Wax.
Speaker 4 (05:02):
That sort of reintroduced Vincent as a.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
Genre film star, and he owned the nineteen fifties, you know.
He moved on from House of Wacks to pictures like
The Fly, and then working with William Castle in crazy
pictures like The House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler,
and then Roger Corman, the great, late great, my good friend.
I wrote a book with him before he passed away
a couple of years ago. Roger Corman brought him on
(05:26):
board The Star and his ed Growland Poe pictures throughout.
Speaker 4 (05:29):
The nineteen sixties like The House of Usher and The
Pit and The Pendulum.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
So it was those movies that put Vincent on the
map as a horror film star. And at that point
Vincent had nothing left to prove, and he would choose
scenery with the best of them and almost deliver these
high opera performances in these pictures. And it's because of
those movies that we think of Vincent as the great
horror star that he was. He leaned into it, but
(05:52):
his real passions were, George, I'm sure you knew, were
art collecting and cooking, and he took a lot of
these pictures all around the world, just to fund his
passion for these two you know, art forms.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
He once said Chris that he took a cut of
the action with Michael Jackson on his Thriller video and
made a fortune, and he said it was the best
investment he ever made.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
Well, you know, Vincent, actually, George, you're kind of right there.
Speaker 4 (06:21):
It's a little bit.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
The person that brought him on board that Thriller song
was Peggy Lipton, you know, from the mod squad in
Twin Peaks, who was married to Quincy Jones. Quincy needed
somebody for Thriller to deliver that monologue, and it was
Peggy that said, look, Quincy, Vincent price, come on, man.
Speaker 4 (06:39):
So he hired Vincent to do it.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
And it's my understanding that it's the opposite there that
Vincent actually did not take a cut. He took a
one time payout, you know, again, just to fund his
operation of collecting art and learning about cooking and writing cookbooks.
And then smacked himself in the head that he screwed up,
that he wishes he had taken a cut, because obviously
(07:02):
Thriller I think to this day the highest grossing album
of all time. So which story is true, I'm not
sure but either way, that was an essential component of
Price's latter day years to reintroduce him to an entirely
new generation of young fans and a completely new demographic
in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
You could be right, I could have it reversed, but
it was one heck of a move one way or another.
Speaker 4 (07:26):
Huh yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
And then you know the video directed by John Landis,
who had previously made an American Werewolf in London, with
those great special effects by Rick Baker.
Speaker 4 (07:38):
I remember seeing that.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
When I was a little boy, and that was a
big part of my transition into more extreme horror. I mean,
that was a terrifying, terrifying little, I say little video.
I think it was thirteen minutes long, and when you're
a kid just hiding behind the couch when it popped
up on MTV with all those shambling zombies and werewolves,
I mean, that was some serious business.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
I mean, throughout some aims of some of these past
stars and tell me how their careers evolved. Let's start
with Boris Karloff. Tell me about him. Well, we all
know Boris Karlov. He's the one of the poster children
of the genre.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
With good reason. We close our eyes.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
We can see that Jack Pierce Cubist makeup on him
and James Wells Frankenstein. But what made Boris so interesting
was he was a working actor for so many years
before he took that gig in nineteen thirty one, a
British actor who wanted to follow in his brother's footsteps
and be an actor, and made his way to Canada
first and foremost. And I say that with some pride
(08:38):
because he actually landed first on a farm not too
far from me outside of Toronto, Canada, and you know,
shoveled cow dung for a year and figured well, this
isn't getting me anywhere, and went out west and applied
his trade and learned how to become an actor.
Speaker 4 (08:53):
That ended up in New York.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
You know, he'd get gigs, then he wouldn't have gigs,
he'd be up on top, and then he'd be working
in a factory on a dock somewhere. Went over to
Hollywood to try to find his way, met up with
Lon Cheney at the same time, and Cheney gave him
the advice and said, Boris, you need a gimmick man,
otherwise no one's going to remember you. So by the
time he got that job as the Monster in thirty
one that completely, irrevocably changed his fortunes.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
He was a humble guy.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
So the thing about Boris is that he was one
of the first horror superstars. But he never ever to
his dying day and he went the long haul. He
passed away in I think nineteen sixty eight, sixty nine.
But he never had an ego. He was always the
gentleman of horror because he realized that, you know, you're
huge today, you're on top today, and you're down on
(09:42):
your ass the next week. You know, whatever comes his way,
whatever came his way, he was grateful for the work,
and I think that shows in those performances.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
How about Belle Laguzzi, mister Dracioma, right.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
I mean, I mean it's obvious that there's two sides
at the coin.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
George.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
I mean, in those early days, he got Bella and
you got Boris because of Universal, you know, bringing those
two gentlemen to the forefront in the early part of
the nineteen thirties, the first two talkie horror films, Dracula
and Frankenstein simbling pictures. But I mean Bella couldn't be
more I say Boris was humble and grateful for the word.
Bella had an ego. It was a hung Hungarian actor
(10:20):
who you know, came to the stage first, couldn't really
speak the language, the English language, but he learned a
lot of his lines phonetically. He had played Dracula on stage. Actually,
some of those first few productions in New York were
directed by the aforementioned William Cassel, and a lot of
people don't know that. But by the time he came
to Hollywood and then he was much more regal, much
(10:41):
more sophisticated, playing the Count. Who was actually offered the
role of Frankenstein's Monster the year after, and he refused,
saying that he didn't want to be buried under that
makeup that you know there was beneath him.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
Now.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
He kicked himself later and wishes to god he did
later on in nineteen forty three, he did play the Monster,
none too effectively.
Speaker 4 (10:57):
And Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman. But Bella's four were never
quite as high as Boris's.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
First of all was the language barrier. He really couldn't
speak the language very well, and the roles just did
not come his way. He was usually relegated to being
a sidekick to Boris Karloff in several pictures, and the
two of them had a sort of front of me
relationship where they on the surface seemed like they got
along as colleagues, but underneath, Bella resented, seethingly resented Boris
(11:25):
Karloff's fortunes and success, and Bella's final days, as many
people know, were not as sunny as Boris' is. He
died with slave to addiction, and I think his final
film was annoble picture directed by the not so great
ed Wood plan nine from Outer Space, which he didn't
(11:45):
even really star, and it was just cobbled together from
whome movies that would have taken of Bella just before
he passed, So his final days were not as sunny
as Boris's.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Did they make any money in those days?
Speaker 3 (11:57):
Chris, Sure they made money, but you know what I mean,
the days of getting the deals, And we talked about
Vincent Price having the option to take the payout or
take the piece of the action. I mean, no one
was getting any piece of the action back then. You
were only as good as your next picture. So residuals
were not the name of the game. So in their heyday,
(12:18):
they were making money. As long as the lights were
on and the work was coming their way, cash was king.
But after those movies, you know, in those early days too,
no vhs, no television, so a movie would open theatrically
and then it would vanish into the ether, maybe be
re released if the was a big enough hit.
Speaker 4 (12:35):
If not, then it was gone.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
So when those movies were gone, so was any chance
of recouping any money from that. So as they aged
and the work started to dry up, especially in Bella's case, no,
there was no money. You know.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
Bella died impoverished. Boris, on the other hand, again, as.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
I mentioned, stayed in the game and worked and worked
and worked until his final days. I think was his
last movie was the Roger Corman produced Peter Bogdanovich art
house masterpiece Targets. So he went out with some glory
and was making money right until the end. But no,
if you were not making money off the pictures, you
made your one time shot, and if you kept working
(13:14):
you were in the chips.
Speaker 4 (13:15):
If not, now, yeah, maybe your career wasn't.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
His sunny, Well, it's Chris Alexander. His book, of course,
is called Art, Trash, Terror, Ventures and Strange cinema, and
cinema is strange. It seems like the lower budget horror
films make more money.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Chris, I always say that if look at some of
the great horror pictures in history, the ones that really
changed the game.
Speaker 4 (13:41):
And I'm talking about.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
Movies like Georgia Merrow's The Knight of the Living Dead
in Night sixty eight or yeah, you know, the Toby Hoopers,
the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and usually come from the underground,
the independence. And you don't need big stars for your
horror film to be successful. You need a great title,
a great concept, a great poster, and you need to
(14:04):
know how to push the buttons to.
Speaker 4 (14:05):
Get your audience to scream.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
And so a lot of these lower budgeted films make
money because guess what, they don't cost a lot of money.
So if you're spending less and you're keeping your production
incredibly controlled. You know, most money in Hollywood, most of
the money, as you know, goes to the stars, which
goes to the actors and the marketing. So if you're
(14:27):
not spending that money and the movies a hit, you're
just sitting back and laughing and counting the bills. You know,
Texas Chainsaw Massacre was a smash success. Night of the
Living Dead played everywhere forever. Now, the sad case in
that particular picture was George Rameirill made a mistake when
he was retitling the film from Night of the Flesh
Eaters to Night of the Living Dead and didn't put
(14:48):
a copyright notice on the film itself, so every distributor
and cinema owner bootlegged that film thinking the movie was
in the public domain. So George actually sadly never made
a dime off that movie. But the movie played forever,
and it put George on the map to have an
illustrious career all throughout the nineteen seventies eighties, right up
until he died in two thousand and thirteen. So yeah,
(15:11):
I mean, horror makes money, and if you spend a little,
your potential potentially can make a lot.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
Lon Cheney, what was his favorites?
Speaker 3 (15:21):
Lon Chaney again, one of the great actors of all time.
Speaker 4 (15:26):
We call him the first horror film actor, George, but
but that's kind of a misnomer.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
I'd say he was just you know, he was a
character actor first and foremost, a vaudevildian star who made
his name at a very young age ran away from home.
Was the child of deaf mute parents, so he learned
from a very young age to use his body his
hands to communicate effectively. So he became a master of
the vaudeville stage. When that started to dry up, he
(15:54):
was a single dad, his son Creighton Cheney, later changing
changing his name to Lawn Cheney Junior and starting in
movies like The Wolfman. They moved to la and he
became a Hollywood bit player actor. But I think I
mentioned as a pioneering special effects artist. He would walk
around with this little case with his makeup and his morticians,
wax and wires, and he would take any job that
came to him because he had to, but also because
(16:16):
he could. He'd go to the studio a lot and
they'd come out and say, okay, we need an old
Chinese fisherman. He'd say, I can do that, and two
minutes later he was a Chinese fisherman. Then he'd go
back in the lot and they'd come back on and
they say, okay, we need an eighty year old woman
with a hunchback, and he'd said, oh, I can do that,
and suddenly he was an eighty year old woman with
a hunchbag. He was the man of a thousand faces.
That literally was what they called him.
Speaker 4 (16:35):
In fact, there was an.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
Old joke going around Hollywood in the twenties that don't
step on that bug, it might be lun Cheney. He
could literally be anybody, and we call it a horror
film star because there were a few films in that
wave of movies he made in the twenties that stand
out as some of the greatest horror films of all time,
First and foremost The Hunchback of Notre Dame, where he
played Quasamoto, and most effectively, the first adaptation of gas St.
(17:00):
LaRue's Phantom of the Opera, that great unmasking scene Cheney
spins around.
Speaker 4 (17:05):
And he's the living skull. People screamed in their seats.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
He died of lung cancer, unfortunately, just as films became
talking pictures. He would have had a great career, but
he didn't make it. But his legacy speaks for itself.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Forty seven years old, that's all he was when he died.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
Yeah, yeah, and again, when you know, when movies became talkies,
when sound was introduced, ninety percent of the big stars
were out of the picture. You know. Rudolph Valentino, the
Sheikh was the Latin lover. Every lady wanted him, every man.
Speaker 4 (17:35):
Wanted to be him.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
Except when he had to speak, he sounded like Mickey Mouse,
so he was out of there.
Speaker 4 (17:40):
Lon Cheney, the Man of.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
A Thousand Faces, because he started on Vaudeville, was a
theater theatrically trained actor, so his voice he was the
man of a thousand voices too. He only made one
talking picture, The Holy Three, and he died just shortly
after the release of that film. But had he had
made had lived, he would have been you know, forget
Boris for Bella, he would have been the big horror
(18:01):
film star of the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Listen to More Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
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George Noory
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