Dracula (1931) - Newspaper Ad [San Francisco Examiner - March 26, 1931]

The first of the Universal Monsters arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area in March of 1931. The weird, terrifying, and fascinating film would be a huge hit, leading then studio head Carl Laemmle Jr. to up the ante with another monster movie. More on that later...

Bela Lugosi delivered a commanding and seeming star making performance that, sad to say, he never managed to escape from its all encompassing shadow. There are far worse things to be remembered for, though.

The Crawling Eye (1958) / Cosmic Monsters [The Cosmic Monster (1958) - Newspaper Ad [San Francisco Examiner - March 3, 1959]

Any afternoon that The Crawling Eye (aka The Trollenberg Terror) would air on either KTVU's Chiller Diller or KBHK's Monstrous Movie was a good one. Despite its being mocked and ridiculed on the very first episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, that fact is eclipsed by my fond memories of it scaring the daylights out of me, back in the day.

There is also the acknowledgment John Carpenter has given the film as a seminal influence on his own cult classic shocker, The Fog. I think the influence is quite obvious, too. Something that only makes me love both movies all the more.