https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries
From roughly the mid-nineteen-fifties through the mid-nineteen-seventies, the availability of airtime on American television stations exceeded their capacity to fill it with high-quality original programming. This was especially true in the hours when relatively few viewers were awake to tune in, a condition that gave rise to the late-night movie show. Specializing in lesser Hollywood productions and the releases of by-then forgotten studios, these programs came to constitute home revival houses, and often eccentric ones. By its very nature, the repertoire of yesteryear’s “B movies” consisted mostly of genre pictures, and no genre proved as popular among this particular viewership as horror. Hence the eventual popularity of hosts like Vampira, Ghoulardi, and, later, the iconic Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.
Widely recognized as having inspired generations of filmmakers, writers, and artists, the late-night movie show also provided ordinary viewers with glimpses of film history and culture they’d never get otherwise. And though its time may be long since over, you can still experience a version of it this Halloween, or on any other night, through sources like the Youtube playlist above.
It collects about 150 horror and suspense films that, whether frightening, kitschy, funny, or some combination of those qualities, could well have been locally broadcast to the willing insomniacs of 50, 60, 70 years ago. Revenge of the Zombies, The Monster Maker, Fangs of the Living Dead, The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, Werewolf in a Girl’s Dormitory: with movies like these, the entertainment — and the enticement to stay tuned, no matter the hour — began right there in the title.
Not that this is a playlist of guilty pleasures alone. Silent pictures like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Golem, Nosferatu, and Häxan continue to be scrutinized by film-studies scholars as foundational to not just modern horror cinema but the visual language of cinema itself. However straitened their budgets, nineteen-sixties features like Carnival of Souls, Night of the Living Dead, The Innocents (a favorite of Martin Scorsese), and the Edgar Allan Poe adaptation The Masque of the Red Death are now credited with merits transcending their genre. But even the less retrospectively elevated likes of The Murder in the Museum, The Earth Dies Screaming, The Little Shop of Horrors, and The Psychopath luridly demonstrate that horror could be mixed with mystery, science fiction, comedy, and psychological drama. The power of that hybridity was what late-night movie shows impressed on their most discerning viewers — which is to say, their least discerning ones.
Visit our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
Related content:
Martin Scorsese Creates a List of the 11 Scariest Horror Films
Jerry Garcia Explains How Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein Changed His Life (1995)
Stephen King’s 22 Favorite Movies, Packed with Horror & Suspense
Hear Vincent Price, Horror Film Legend, Read 8+ Hours of Scary Stories
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
