'Dracula', 'Frankenstein', And Other Classic Universal Monster Movies Will Briefly Be Available For Free On YouTube This Month
If you made a movie-related New Years resolution to catch up on some old horror classics, here's some good news: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, and several more classic Universal monster movies will be available to stream on YouTube for free later this month.
Find out when you can stream these titles – and when they'll once again disappear like a bat on a foggy night.
NME (via Bloody-Disgusting) reports that seven movies, which were originally released from the 1930s and into the late 1940s, will be available to stream for free this month. NBCUniversal, the rights holder to these titles, will be putting all seven films on the Fear: The Home of Horror YouTube channel, which is based out of the United Kingdom.
Here is the schedule:
January 15, 2021 (8pm GMT)
January 16, 2021 (8pm GMT)
January 17, 2021 (8pm GMT)
Each of these titles will only be available to view for free on YouTube for one week.
I'd never heard of this channel before, but it appears to be a nice resource for burgeoning horror fans who may not be as familiar with these old-school classics as they are with their successors that were inspired by them. There are a ton of introductory videos that give surface-level context about the making of these historic productions, the filmmakers behind them, and the icons whose careers were made by starring in them, so if you're looking to brush up on your Universal monsters (or maybe to just get a quick refresher), Fear: The Home of Horror seems like a decent place to start.
My personal favorite of the entires above is probably 1941's The Wolf Man, directed by George Waggner and starring Lon Chaney, Jr. as the title character. One of the primary reasons I'm fond of it is because a couple of the supporting players are major names who appear elsewhere in the Universal monsters web: Bela Lugosi (Dracula) plays a gypsy, while Claude Rains (The Invisible Man) plays Sir John Talbot, the estranged father of Chaney's character. The movie is incredibly efficient with its storytelling – it's only 70 minutes long – and features the type of moody, atmospheric production design you expect from one of these studio classics, as well as a heartbreaking ending involving a father, his son, and a walking stick with a silver wolf's head on it. Definitely worth a watch if you've never seen it before.