In the 80’s, music legend Frank Zappa was involved in a failed attempt to raise funds for a Russian horror movie.
There were actually serious plans for a movie featuring Batman fighting Godzilla. In fact, assuming I’m understanding this correctly, there might have been two separate attempts for such a film!
As you can see here, “In space, no one can hear you scream” was not Fox’s first choice for the tagline for Alien.
Although the finished film features a Nessie-style creature, The Crater Lake Monster was originally supposed to be about Bigfoot.
The battered original prop from The Time Machine somehow wound up in a thrift store after the film had been completed. Thankfully, it was rescued and restored by Bob Burns. This also lead to the filming of the semi-sequel Time Machine: The Journey Back.
Despite the costumes seen in The Horror of Party Beach looking ridiculous onscreen, seeing a person wearing one in the bathroom was enough to startle Fox’s head of distribution during a special screening of the film.
Before deciding on the title The Creeping Unknown, the American release of The Quatermass Xperiment was originally going to be called “Shock!”
William Girdler’s adaptation of Graham Masterton’s novel The Manitou had an interesting effect on the author. Characters who had been killed off in the original novel (but were left alive in the film) were revived without explanation in the follow-up books in the Manitou book series. Oh, and that link also notes how the ending of the novel was wildly different than what was seen onscreen for the movie’s finale.
Due to safety concerns expressed by Claire Brennen, the makeup seen at the end of She Freak was made from various foodstuffs.
When Rita Mae Brown wrote the script for what eventually became The Slumber Party Massacre, the movie was supposed to be a parody of the slasher genre. However, the producers decided to treat the movie as if it was a serious film (despite leaving all of the jokes in it).
Remember the shock jock character in Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers? Well, it turns out the part was originally offered to Howard Stern.
Most horror fans know the anthology movie The Devil’s Messenger is made up of edited together episodes of the Swedish TV series 13 Demon Street. What they might not realize is that the Hell sequence was filmed especially for the movie.
