https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

From rough­ly the mid-nine­teen-fifties through the mid-nine­teen-sev­en­ties, the avail­abil­i­ty of air­time on Amer­i­can tele­vi­sion sta­tions exceed­ed their capac­i­ty to fill it with high-qual­i­ty orig­i­nal pro­gram­ming. This was espe­cial­ly true in the hours when rel­a­tive­ly few view­ers were awake to tune in, a con­di­tion that gave rise to the late-night movie show. Spe­cial­iz­ing in less­er Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­tions and the releas­es of by-then for­got­ten stu­dios, these pro­grams came to con­sti­tute home revival hous­es, and often eccen­tric ones. By its very nature, the reper­toire of yes­ter­year’s “B movies” con­sist­ed most­ly of genre pic­tures, and no genre proved as pop­u­lar among this par­tic­u­lar view­er­ship as hor­ror. Hence the even­tu­al pop­u­lar­i­ty of hosts like Vam­pi­ra, Ghoular­di, and, lat­er, the icon­ic Elvi­ra, Mis­tress of the Dark.

Wide­ly rec­og­nized as hav­ing inspired gen­er­a­tions of film­mak­ers, writ­ers, and artists, the late-night movie show also pro­vid­ed ordi­nary view­ers with glimpses of film his­to­ry and cul­ture they’d nev­er get oth­er­wise. And though its time may be long since over, you can still expe­ri­ence a ver­sion of it this Hal­loween, or on any oth­er night, through sources like the Youtube playlist above.

It col­lects about 150 hor­ror and sus­pense films that, whether fright­en­ing, kitschy, fun­ny, or some com­bi­na­tion of those qual­i­ties, could well have been local­ly broad­cast to the will­ing insom­ni­acs of 50, 60, 70 years ago. Revenge of the Zom­bies, The Mon­ster Mak­er, Fangs of the Liv­ing Dead, The Brain That Would­n’t Die, Were­wolf in a Girl’s Dor­mi­to­ry: with movies like these, the enter­tain­ment — and the entice­ment to stay tuned, no mat­ter the hour — began right there in the title.

Not that this is a playlist of guilty plea­sures alone. Silent pic­tures like The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari, The Golem, Nos­fer­atu, and Häx­an con­tin­ue to be scru­ti­nized by film-stud­ies schol­ars as foun­da­tion­al to not just mod­ern hor­ror cin­e­ma but the visu­al lan­guage of cin­e­ma itself. How­ev­er strait­ened their bud­gets, nine­teen-six­ties fea­tures like Car­ni­val of Souls, Night of the Liv­ing Dead, The Inno­cents (a favorite of Mar­tin Scors­ese), and the Edgar Allan Poe adap­ta­tion The Masque of the Red Death are now cred­it­ed with mer­its tran­scend­ing their genre. But even the less ret­ro­spec­tive­ly ele­vat­ed likes of The Mur­der in the Muse­um, The Earth Dies Scream­ing, The Lit­tle Shop of Hor­rors, and The Psy­chopath lurid­ly demon­strate that hor­ror could be mixed with mys­tery, sci­ence fic­tion, com­e­dy, and psy­cho­log­i­cal dra­ma. The pow­er of that hybrid­i­ty was what late-night movie shows impressed on their most dis­cern­ing view­ers — which is to say, their least dis­cern­ing ones.

Vis­it our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Mar­tin Scors­ese Cre­ates a List of the 11 Scari­est Hor­ror Films

Time Out Lon­don Presents The 100 Best Hor­ror Films: Start by Watch­ing Four Hor­ror Clas­sics Free Online

Jer­ry Gar­cia Explains How Abbott and Costel­lo Meet Franken­stein Changed His Life (1995)

Stephen King’s 22 Favorite Movies, Packed with Hor­ror & Sus­pense

Watch Free Cult Films by Stan­ley Kubrick, Fritz Lang, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi & More on the New Kino Cult Stream­ing Ser­vice

Hear Vin­cent Price, Hor­ror Film Leg­end, Read 8+ Hours of Scary Sto­ries

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.