Why You Should Read the Classics
by Kurt S. Michaels, editor of Horror's Classic Masters: Remastered

Many of you may wonder, why should you care about some stories that are more than 100 years old? Especially when there is so much to read from today's masters of horror, such as Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Peter Straub, F. Paul Wilson.

Because without the classics, there would be no Stephen King, Dean Koontz or the like. Today's authors were heavily influenced by the likes of Poe, Irving, and Stoker. And will continue to draw from those very same wellsprings of horror.

Could there be any vampire books around without Bram Stoker having created Dracula from an amalgam of obscure myths?

There is no way to know whether Stephen King ever read "The Mezzotint", but it may have been the precursor of Stephen King's short story "The Road Virus Heads North". You may have seen it made into a television episode of Nightmares and Dreamscapes starring Tom Berenger.

And it is not just our book writers who are influenced by the classics. How many movies have you seen that were based on some of these stories?

Everyone has heard about, if not seen, 1999's Sleepy Hollow by Tim Burton, starring Johnny Depp as Constable Ichabod Crane, loosely based on Washington Irving's main character. In 1980 it was a TV movie with Jeff Goldblum as the scrawny schoolmaster. It was also a Disney cartoon, narrated by Bing Crosby.

"The Monkey's Paw" has been made into a movie numerous times (beginning in 1915) and is currently being remade by Sam Raimi's production company, set for release in 2007 or 2008.   Many of you know Raimi as the director of the Spider-Man films, but do you know that he got his start in the horror genre, with the hilarious yet gory Evil Dead trilogy? And that he continues to dabble in horror, with films such as Darkman , The Grudge , Boogeyman and The Gift ?

When it comes to horror, the undisputed granddaddy of the genre is Edgar Allan Poe, and many of his stories were used as fodder for movies. "The Fall of the House of Usher" was made into a 1960 Roger Corman film starring Vincent Price.   A 1988 updated version of the tale was called The House of Usher and starred Oliver Reed and Donald Pleasence. It has recently been adapted into yet another version, this time for 2007 theatrical release. The new film's website can be found at http://thehouseofusher.net.

Corman and Price teamed up again for 1961's The Pit and The Pendulum . Only the film's third act was based on the Poe tale; Corman fleshed in a back story to give the movie solidity. They also worked together on 1964's The Masque of The Red Death , a story that can be seen in its entirety on this website.   Although the 1964 film made sweeping changes from the original story, it is considered one of Corman's best films.

The 1934 film The Black Cat starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff was actually not based on the story by Edgar Allan Poe, but the director/screenwriter claimed that it was in order to draw publicity to the movie.   The 1966 version was much closer to Poe's tale, but had a little-known cast and a small budget.

Pay no attention to the 1995 film titled Roger Corman Presents Burial of the Rats . It has almost nothing whatsoever to do with the story of the same name, and is actually a fictional account of Bram Stoker getting involved in exploitation-movie situations, including being chased by a cult of bikini-wearing man-haters led by Adrienne Barbeau.

Many of the writings of H.G. Wells have been turned into films , including The Time Machine (1960's classic starring Rod Taylor), The War of the Worlds (2005's instant classic blockbuster by Stephen Spielberg starring Tom Cruise rivaled, if not bettered--a matter of taste, to be sure--by the 1953 classic starring Gene Barry), The Invisible Man (1933's version with Claude Rains the forerunner of the less successful Memoirs of the Invisible Man starring Chevy Chase and directed by John Carpenter, the 1975-1976 TV show starring David McCallum and co-created by Stephen Bochco, and a very cool but short-lived 2000-2001 TV series on Sci Fi network with Vincent Ventresca ), The Isle of Dr. Moreau (1996's John Frankenheimer film, The Island of Dr. Moreau , starring Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer; 1977's The Island of Dr. Moreau starring Burt Lancaster and Michael York; and 1933's Island of Lost Souls , starring Charles Laughton and Bela Lugosi).

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the classics Treasure Island , Kidnapped , and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde . Each of you must have read at least one of these books in school, and seen one of the many movies based on each novel. Even young children have seen Disney's Treasure Planet , loosely based on Treasure Island .

"Young Goodman Brown" was a 1993 film, with the lovely Melinda Clarke (of C.S.I. and The O.C. fame) in the role of Faith.   Of course, that was the movie's only claim to fame, and otherwise no one would have ever heard of it.

William Hope Hodgson's novel The House on the Borderland was adapted into a comic book by Simon Revelstroke under DC Comics' Vertigo imprint, with art by Richard Corben and a wonderful foreword by the great writer Alan Moore.

The Horror Classics line of comic book adaptations from Eureka Productions includes volumes illustrating stories by Poe, Wells, Stoker, Stevenson, Ambrose Bierce.