Monster World #6 - Warren

This is another one of those "How did I get this?" magazines, where I found it in the box but have absolutely no memory of when or why I got it.

The cover is in fact not a painting but a sculpture/mask combo of some sort, and I find it genuinely unsettling. Despite the goofy yuletide accessory, it feels dead and creepy to me, the way a thousand images of Boris Karloff, Glenn Strange, or Bela Lugosi as the Monster do not.

Anyway, like its more famous counterpart, Famous Monsters of Filmland, this issue features big splashy photo articles on vintage(and some contemporary) genre films, like Return of thr Vampire, Dr.Terror's House of Horrors(featuring a still with Donald Sutherland, guaranteed the only time he'd ever show up in a mag like this), Revenge of the Zombies(which really doesn't deserve the six pages of space its given), Queen From Outer Space, Tarantula, and Dracula, Prince of Darkness.

There's also an article called "Dens of Demons", focusing on the elaborate sets sometimes constructed for these films, a nice, arty touch--Warren should've given a couple more pages to this and taken them away from Revenge of the Zombies.

"It Asked For You" is the odd feature where movie stills are "dedicated" to loyal readers(um, ok), and then its time for Bill Obbagy's "Terror Talk", sort of the blog of its day.

We end with "Monsters on the Brain", a trivia quiz where you have to match movie quotes with the movies they're from(I didn't do so well). Interesting note--the quiz is written by John and Michael Brunas, who among other things grew up to co-write(with Tom Weaver) the great Universal Horrors hardcover book, a tome I've read many, many times. Nice job, boys!

Monster World #1 - Warren

I thought we'd give Creepy and Eerie a break and talk about a lesser known Warren mag, their companion volume to Famous Monsters of Filmland, Monster World.

MW was published in 1964 concurrently with FMOF, and it was always intended as a "more of" type of publication--the contents were virtually the same. In fact, when MW was cancelled, Warren decided that it was essentially another ten issues of FMOF, and so that magazine jumped in numbering from #69 to #80 in one month. Huh?

Anyway, behind the uncredited cover painting(I don't know who would've thought to do a werewolf in shades of blue, but it actually came out pretty cool), there are articles like:
"Lurking Ahead" about upcoming horror movies like The Castle of Terror, The Castle of Blood, and Dr.Terror's House of Horrors(funny how you can make three films from the same few words).

There's also "Battle of the Frankensteins" about two goofy versions of the Monster, like when Mr.Magoo Met Frankenstein(!), "It Asked For You", a weird section where monster pics are "matched up" with readers names(no, I didn't understand it either), a piece on Lionel Atwill called "The Maddest Doctor", and the six-page comics adaptation of The Mummy by Russ Jones and Wally Wood(reprinted many times, I think it made its debut here).

There's also an article on The Black Sleep(since it starred Lugosi, Chaney, Carradine, Rathbone, Tor Johnson and Akim Tamiroff), a sort of "horror gossip" column called "Terror Talk" by Bill Obbagy, and then of course mant, many pages of horror merchandise, including those cool Movie Monster Model Kits, for a $1.00 each!

*sigh*