Creature Feature: Saturday Afternoon Horror
The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) As a kid growing up in the '60s and '70s, I spent my Saturday afternoons glued to the TV in the family room, devouring black-and-white horror movies on Cleveland’s Channel 43. Even then, I knew these movies were lousy and rarely found them scary. Many were from the 1950s, featuring rubber-suit monsters and titles like The Thing from Another World and It! The Terror Beyond Space . I didn’t know it at the time, but there were plenty of excellent black-and-white horror movies – ones I wasn’t sophisticated enough to appreciate, such as Night of the Hunter , Nosferatu , and Freaks . I was familiar with the Universal horror films of the 1930s and early 1940s, the greats like Dracula and Frankenstein . Despite Channel 43’s propensity for '50s schlock, some of the Universal classics still made their way there. The Thing from Another World! (1951) My afternoon TV ritual was usually interrupted b...
