Sunday, December 8, 2019
The Horror of Hillory Hill
I thought I had already posted this Lou Cameron tale here at THOIA, (it gets harder and harder to keep track of these things!), but we simply put it in the Lou Cameron's Unsleeping Dead Chilling hardcover collection (still available HERE!) Despite a few wonderfully goofball moments with the script, Lou's sense of cinematic angles, detail, and eerie atmosphere really send this one over the top-- and that climax is a doozy! From the July 1954 issue of Baffling Mysteries #21.
Everybody is monster but nobody notices!
ReplyDelete"In the end there was no monster"
ReplyDelete"They scream and yell and their torches pimple the hill in a rash of flaming boils."
ReplyDelete"Only the bloated rats of Hillory House are witnesses to the funeral of the vampire in the damp cellar of the Hillory monstrosity!"
"The moon suddenly splatters the night with sallow light! Felix's eyes bulge at the sight revealed to him!"
Gosh, I love it when they dare to get poetic with these things. I mean, the art here is obviously mighty (I particularly love the panel of Martha knitting innocently at the full moon), but what really got me was how endlessly fun it was to read.
What a great goofy story. How the hell did they not run into each other at night stalking victims? It's not that big of a village! Yet they seemed to do it for years!
ReplyDeleteI love monster mashes. Takes me right back to being a kid. Just throw a bunch of monsters together in mortal (k)combat and I'm happy.
The art is excellent. The opening panel is beautiful, and then framing it with the two off-center panels to not distract from the splash, which looks like a poster. I'd hang that on my wall.
On page 2, the fire forming the caption is great. I love the solid-winged vampire, the burial is spooky, and while the lore is about as all over the map as you'd expect, that's an awesome zombie.
Beautiful piece of work. Goofy as hell and beautiful. How you want your pre-code horror comics!
Art's great, but the story ... I half expected it to turn out that they had a housecat and she was secretly a Ghoul of Bubastis or something like that. 😂
ReplyDeleteSomehow I would've preferred Felix to REALLY turn out be the only completely human character. Or even Felix and Karl. Sad though either ending would be, considering.
ReplyDeleteOn Page 4, someone's mind must have been on too many scary things at once to turn "Vampire" into "Viper."
'festering boil','their torches pimple..','..with a rash of flaming boils.'. Was the writer a frustrated dermatologist?
ReplyDeleteA zombie fightin' a werewolf? It's not even my Birthday!
A great one.
Wonderful! Thank you Mr.K., a fun ride this one.
ReplyDeleteBecause the sun kills werewolves.
ReplyDeleteIf you fail to notice your kid has been a zombie for some time, you probably suck as parents.