There will never be any horror icons as immortal and awesome as the Universal Monsters line-up. The ’80s slasher pantheon will always have its place, but the Universal originals — Dracula, Frankenstein and his Bride, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, the Creature from the Black Lagoon — have a timelessness to them that punks, goths, metalheads, and all other bloodthirsty miscreants will admire for all time. Which is why it feels like Halloween has come a little early this year, as NBC has announced that their classic Universal Monsters movies will be streaming for free on YouTube!
According to Bloody Disgusting, starting January 15th, a select number of Universal Studios’ classic black-and-white monster movies will stream for free on the YouTube account Fear: The Home of Horror. Each film becomes available at 8pm GMT and will be streamable for a week following its initial premiere, so make sure your Friday nights are free.
While the list is missing one or two of the more important films in the series — no Gill Man? Denied! — it still contains the true immortals of this time in cinema — Bela Lugosi as Dracula, Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster and Imhotep the Mummy, Elsa Lancaster as the Bride of Frankenstein, Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolf Man, and Claude Rains as the Invisible Man (for the record, the Invisible Man might seem like the least iconic of these films, but it might actually be one of the best — Rains is awesome in that movie).
Here’s the line-up as it stands:
January 15, 2021
- Dracula (1931)
- The Mummy (1932)
January 16, 2021
- Frankenstein (1931)
- Bride Of Frankenstein (1935)
January 17, 2021
- The Invisible Man (1933)
- The Wolf Man (1941)
- Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)
So if you had plans to binge-watch some Netflix-produced British drama about period clothing or gangsters in vests or whatever the fuck, reschedule that shit to February, because fear is back on the menu.
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Words by Chris Krovatin
