Granted immortality through their movies, though death has claimed most of these great stars, true to form they continue to haunt our screens and our dreams. Here we pay tribute to ten timeless stars of the scary arts.
Horrible Hero: Bela Lugosi (real name Béla Ferenc Dezsõ Blaskó)
Monstrous Moniker: Hollywood’s Dark Prince
Ominous Origin: Born 20/10/1882 in Lugos, Hungary (now Romania); died 16/8/66
Reign of Terror: A shameless yet undeniably magnetic ham, Lugosi was almost 50 when he hypnotized the world as Dracula (1931). Over the next three decades he made more than 50 horror movies, most of them dreadful.
Fearsome Facts: When Lugosi died, a penniless morphine addict, he was buried in his Dracula cape.
Spooky Saying: "I was unruly as a boy, like Jekyll and Hyde. With boys, I was a brute. With girls, a lamb."
Horrible Hero: Lon Chaney
Monstrous Moniker: The Man of a Thousand Faces
Ominous Origin: Born 1/4/1883 in Colorado; died 26/8/30
Reign of Terror: A master of early make-up effects, Chaney had already made more than 130 films before electrifying silent cinema with a string of horror hits, most notably The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and Phantom of the Opera (1925).
Fearsome Facts: Chaney was director Tod Browning’s original choice to play Dracula, but he died shortly before production began.
Spooky Saying: "My whole career has been devoted to keeping people from knowing me."
Horrible Hero: Boris Karloff (real name William Henry Pratt)
Monstrous Moniker: The Uncanny
Ominous Origin: Born 23/11/1887 in Camberwell, London; died 2/2/69
Reign of Terror: A gentle, cultured man of medium build, Karloff was not the obvious choice to play The Monster in Frankenstein (1931). Fortunately, Lugosi turned the role down, and Karloff staggered cinemagoers with his intense and poignant performance. "He’s my best friend," said Karloff of the role he played three times. A lifetime of horror films followed.
Fearsome Facts: Karloff was afraid of mice.
Spooky Saying: "When I was nine I played the demon king in Cinderella and it launched me on a long and happy life of being a monster."
Horrible Hero: Lon Chaney Jr (real name Creighton Tull Chaney)
Monstrous Moniker: The Master Monster
Ominous Origin: Born 10/2/06 in Oklahoma; died 12/7/73
Reign of Terror: Unable to escape his father’s shadow, Chaney made a name for himself in horror with The Wolf Man (1941) and stayed close to the genre until he died. His favourite role, though, was Lennie in Of Mice and Men (1939).
Fearsome Facts: Chaney remains the only actor who has played the Wolf Man, Frankenstein’s Monster, The Mummy and Dracula.
Spooky Saying: "They expected me to know immediately what it took my father 20 years to learn."
Horrible Hero: Vincent Price
Monstrous Moniker: King of the Grand Guignol
Ominous Origin: Born 27/5/11 in Missouri, USA; died 25/10/93
Reign of Terror: A fiendishly charismatic character actor, art collector and gourmet chef, Price’s horror career began with 3-D shocker House Of Wax (1953), gathered momentum with The Fly (1958) and House on Haunted Hill (1959) and peaked with a number of psychedelic 1960s Poe adaptations.
Fearsome Facts: Notoriously superstitious, Price once joked that he kept a horseshoe, a crucifix and a mezuzah on his front door.
Spooky Saying: "I don’t play monsters. I play men besieged by fate and out for revenge."
Horrible Hero: Peter Cushing
Monstrous Moniker: The Gentle Man of Horror
Ominous Origin: Born 26/5/13 in Kenley, Surrey; died 11/8/94
Reign of Terror: Together with partner-in-crime Christopher Lee, Cushing dominated British horror for more than 20 years thanks to his long association with Hammer and rival horror studio Amicus. His first scary film was 1957’s Curse Of Frankenstein.
Fearsome Facts: Nearly every shot of Cushing in Star Wars is from the waist up as his boots were too tight so he wore slippers instead.
Spooky Saying: "If I played Hamlet, they’d call it a horror film."
Horrible Hero: Christopher Lee
Monstrous Moniker: The Count
Ominous Origin: Born 27/5/22 in Belgravia, London; died 7/6/15
Reign of Terror: Fame eluded 6’5” Lee until he embarked with Peter Cushing on Hammer remakes of all the great Universal horror films (from 1957). Despite his more recent success as evil sorcerer Saruman in The Lord of the Rings movies, the role he will forever be linked with is Dracula, a character he played a whopping nine times.
Fearsome Facts: Lee boasts almost 300 screen credits, more than any other actor.
Spooky Saying: "Peter Cushing and I have made so many horror films that people think we live in a cave together."
Horrible Heroine: Ingrid Pitt (real name Ingoushka Petrov)
Monstrous Moniker: The Queen of Horror
Ominous Origin: Born 21/11/37 in Poland; died 23/11/10
Reign of Terror: A Holocaust survivor with considerable physical attributes, Pitt brought out the saucy side of horror in the early 1970s.
Fearsome Facts: While shooting The Vampire Lovers (1970), Pitt’s fangs routinely fell into Kate O’Mara’s cleavage.
Spooky Saying: "It’s great meeting the fans. They say I’m more beautiful now than I was 25 years ago. All lies, of course, but sweet. Where else is an old bag like me going to find strapping young men and women to whisper sweet nothings in her ear?"
Horrible Hero: Robert Englund
Monstrous Moniker: Freddy
Ominous Origin: Born 6/6/49 in California, USA
Reign of Terror: Englund transformed into a star the moment he pulled on the razor blade glove that became his trademark weapon as spectral child killer Freddy Krueger, "the bastard son of a hundred maniacs", in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). He’s made eight Freddy movies to date, and lots more horror besides.
Fearsome Facts: Englund’s favourite Freddy kill is the disabled Latino boy in movie number 6, because it proved that Krueger was an "equal opportunity" psycho.
Spooky Saying: "I was originally typecast as a Southerner. Then I played a lot of rednecks, moving on to sidekicks, nerds and finally monsters."
Horrible Heroine: Jamie Lee Curtis
Monstrous Moniker: The Scream Queen
Ominous Origin: Born 22/11/58 in California, USA
Reign of Terror: No one screams like Jamie Lee, a wafer-thin horror heroine who, in 1978, deafened audiences as psycho survivor Laurie Strode in John Carpenter’s definitive slasher classic Halloween. She did four of the eight Halloween movies, and in 2002 instalment Resurrection, finally died at the hands of Michael Myers. Of course, she then came back to life for 2018's Halloween, a sequel to the first two films that ignored all the others. See her next in 2021's Halloween Kills, then in 2022's Halloween Ends!
Fearsome Facts: Curtis’s mum Janet Leigh was the first person killed in the first ever slasher movie, Psycho (1960).
Spooky Saying: "I am so sick of the violent and nasty movies being directed at young people."
Guest blogger: Marshall Julius
