Son of Horror Trivia

Originally, Godzilla foe King Ghidorah was supposed to have rainbow-colored wings. Although this idea was eventually abandoned, it did make its way into some early publicity pictures.

Back when 8mm horror master Nathan Schiff was shopping around his low budget epics to VHS companies, one wanted to release The Long Island Cannibal Massacre under the name "Cannibal Hookers 2: The Father's Story." Naturally, Schiff was less than pleased about the idea and the release never happened.

In 1978, an Italian film company made an unauthorized semi-sequel to the 70's King Kong remake called Ciao Maschio (known as Bye Bye Monkey in America).


In the 80's, Atari was developing a video game based on The Entity. I really, really hope it was based on the freeze gun scene and not the film's most infamous sequence.

Many horror fans are at least somewhat aware that the film Spookies originally started out as a film called Twisted Souls and later had new footage shot in order to replace certain segments. What they might not know is just how wild and crazy the filming process actually was. And that was before another director was called in to finish the film!

Bela Lugosi once did a decidedly odd promotion for a restaurant in California involving fried grasshoppers and other unusual foods.

In certain parts of the US, armadillos are occasionally exhibited in sideshows as "midnight flesh-eating graverobbers!" Presumably this is because they look vaguely like some exotic type of rat, which is allegedly why armadillos were used in scene in the original Dracula. Although I still wonder why that film had insects emerging from small, coffin-like boxes...

As a fan of the 90's horror comedy Freaked, I was shocked to learn that a novelization, toy line and comic book based on it had been released around the time the film was originally released.

The 1966 film Chamber of Horrors was originally filmed as a made-for-TV movie to act as a pilot for a series called "House of Wax." However, it got a theatrical release after it was deemed too violent for TV and had its "Fear Flasher" and "Horror Horn" gimmicks added in order to pad out the running time.

Valley of the Dragons was made largely because one of the producers had the right to use stock footage from One Million B.C. and because the other producer's son found a Jules Verne story that had never been adapted in America. Although the belief that the original story was never published in America was incorrect, the comment that it was anti-semetic was sadly true.

Many prints of The Hideous Sun Demon are missing a scene where the creature crushes a rat to death. Speaking of the Sun Demon, the infamous "wet pants" publicity picture was due to the actor's sweat trickling down into that portion of the costume and the film was given a comedic redubbing (and some newly filmed material) in the 80's to create What's Up, Hideous Sun Demon (aka Revenge of the Sun Demon on most home video releases).

After reading One Thousand and One Nights when he was five years old, H.P. Lovecraft announced to his mother that he wished to be known as "Abdul Alhazred." Although he later went out of that phase, he did recycle the name as the writer of the fabled Necronomicon. Speaking of which, the book's fictional translation history is actually an injoke of sorts by Lovecraft.