Svengoolie’s May Schedule is Here to Scare-ify Your Springtime!
Spring has now sprung in all its ghoul-ory, and Svengoolie‘s May schedule for MeTV‘s Svengoolie Classic Horror & Sci-Fi Movie is here to chill you as the weather heats up. This month’s offerings are stacked with stars like William Shatner, Bela Lugosi, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, and Boris Karloff — and slightly less-known for equally important co-stars, like giant bees, angry tarantulas, and a witch who stirs up a lot of trouble without ever appearting on screen.
Read on to find out what he’ll be scaring up on the show this month, every Saturday night at 8pm ET!
May 3: Mysterious Island (1961)
Everett Collection
Stop-motion animation legend Ray Harryhausen made the freaky creatures that star in this feature about a group of Union soldiers who escape the Civil War, only to end up on the titular mysterious island, which is populated with giant animals. The film was based on Jules Verne’s 1874 novel The Mysterious Island, a sequel to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and was the third movie ever to use Harryhausen’s signature Dynamation technique, after The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and The 3 Worlds of Gulliver.
May 10: Kingdom of Spiders (1977)
Everett Collection
Arachnophobes, steer clear! But all others, settle in to enjoy this film about killer spiders, part of the post-Jaws boom in “nature gone wild” films. William Shatner plays a veterinarian in a small Arizona town that finds itself under attack by hungry, angry spiders. Though some of the spiders in the movie are rubber, 5,000 real spiders were actually used on screen — and wranglers were allegedly paid $10 per spider, which means that $50,000 of the film’s budget went towards obtaining these arachnid actors.
May 17: Double Feature! The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) and The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Everett Collection
First up: the first Universal Frankenstein film in which Lon Chaney Jr. replaced Boris Karloff, The Ghost of Frankenstein. But the original Frankie didn’t skip this movie because he was sick of the character or didn’t like the script, which follows the Monster and Ygor (Bela Lugosi) as they attempt to get Henry Frankenstein’s son on their side. Rather, Karloff is absent from this film because the shoot conflicted with his Broadway performance in Arsenic and Old Lace. Chaney Jr. may have initially wished he’d also skipped the film — the makeup used to create the Monster supposedly gave him an allergic reaction so severe, he had to skip several days of work to recover.
Artisan Entertainment/courtesy Everett Collection
Then: get ready for the movie that turned found-footage horror movies into an international craze with The Blair Witch Project. The backstory behind this ultra-low-budget indie is arguably more famous than the film itself: the directors recruited unknown actors, sent them off to the woods to film each other while improvising a movie — and let the wider world believe that the resulting film was a real documentary about a film crew that really did die in the woods under eerie circumstances.
But what you might not know is that, of the three actors, only Joshua Leonard is still acting. Michael Williams became a middle school guidance counselor, and Heather Donahue, who called using her actual name as the character’s name in the film her “biggest life regret to this day,” changed her name to Rei Hance and currently works as a writer, teacher, and coach.
May 24: The Mummy (1959)
Everett Collection
Christopher Lee stars at the titular mummy, while Peter Cushing is the archaeologist looking to end the ancient one’s murderous rampage. This film, co-financed by Universal, was the first of three remakes Hammer did of Universal properties: the others were 1962’s Phantom of the Opera, and 1963’s The Old Dark House. A planned remake of The Invisible Man was never realized.
May 31: Haunted Strangler (1958)
Everett Collection
Boris Karloff stars as James Rankin, an author in 1880s London, investigating a series of bizarre murders that occurred two decades prior. Was the man executed for the crimes actually the perpetrator? Or is the true answer something much stranger? The story that inspired the film was written specifically for Karloff, by his friend Jan Read.
The movie was director Robert Day’s second; he would go on to a long career that involved helming multiple Tarzan films, working on TV shows including Matlock and Barnaby Jones, and ended with directing the 1987 Sam Elliott Western The Quick and the Dead.
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