Gallery of Horrors (1966)
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Villain(s)
Zombie, witch, vampire, werewolf
Actor(s):
Joey Benson, John Carradine, Lon Chaney Jr., Roger Gentry
Brief Description
Gallery of Horrors (most commonly released as Dr. Terror's Gallery of Horrors) is a low-budget, American horror anthology film directed by David L. Hewitt. While production was completed around 1966, it was formally released theatrically in 1967. The film is notorious for its extremely low production values, reliance on Roger Corman stock footage, and its framing device hosted by horror icon John Carradine.
Plot:
Bob and Julie Farrell purchase a historically plagued Salem mansion for a cheap price. The town doctor, Barnaby Finchley, warns them about the community's dark history of witchcraft. Disregarding the warnings, Bob uncovers a massive grandfather clock in the basement and winds it back up. Soon after, a mysterious old man named Tristram Halbin (John Carradine) arrives. The clock belongs to a historic local coven. Re-activating it summons the ancient witches back to the house to reclaim their territory. Set in Victorian London, a string of brutal murders has plagued the city. Scotland Yard labels the elusive, slight-figured killer the "King of the Vampires" and assigns Inspector John Brenner to track him down. Brenner's investigation leads him to suspect a local reporter, but the true identity of the bloodsucker turns out to be Inspector Brenner's own superior at Scotland Yard.
Dr. Charles Spalding is an ambitious scientist who accidentally overdoses on his own experimental resurrection drug. His unfaithful wife and her lover (who is also Spalding's medical colleague) deliberately leave him to die so they can steal his research. The drug actually works. Spalding rises from the grave as a reanimated zombie and returns to exact a slow, gruesome revenge on his murderous wife and her new husband. Dr. Mendell (Lon Chaney Jr.) is a professor obsessed with the forbidden medical texts of a disgraced scientist named Erich von Frankenstein. Two of his ambitious medical students discover his obsession and blackmail him into helping them reanimate a fresh human cadaver. The resurrection experiment succeeds flawlessly. However, the students soon realize that the John Doe they chose to bring back to life was actually a notorious, unrepentant serial killer.
In a loose adaptation of Bram Stoker's classic tale, a real estate solicitor named Jonathan Harker travels deep into Transylvania. His mission is to finalize the sale of the Carfax Abbey deed to the enigmatic Count Alucard. While at the castle, female vampires emerge, and dead bodies begin piling up in the nearby village. The villagers rise up against the vampires. When cornered by Count Alucard, Jonathan Harker reveals a monstrous secret of his own: he is actually a werewolf, resulting in a sudden monster-versus-monster battle. To avoid lawsuits over its similarity to Amicus Productions’ hit Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965), the movie was re-released under various titles including Gallery of Horror, Return from the Past, The Blood Suckers, and Alien Massacre. Shot for an estimated $15,000 to $30,000, the production recycled iconic set pieces, entire sequences, and footage from Roger Corman's high-profile Edgar Allan Poe film adaptations to artificially pad its run time.