‘The 1931 Dracula has not maintained its original impact.  That it is watchable at all is most probably due to the strange tricks which Bela Lugosi performs with the English language, and to the absurd exaggerations that pass for acting with him and Dwight Frye.’

          ‘…for audiences of 1931 this was horror; and without this now stiff and unfrightening film there would have been no other Universal monsters and no family sagas of their dark doings. As it was, within a year the genuinely classical Frankenstein was unleashed to strike true terror into the hearts of the world, and from then on there was no turning back.’

          ‘Many more recent films date badly, but Frankenstein seems to have lost none of its stark style, though the romantic scenes, in which Whale clearly took no interest, might have been treated more realistically. It remains more truly frightening than any of our modern horror sagas filled with bloody corpses and severed eyeballs. And it retains this effect because Whale intuitively used his camera to get through to fears and hopes which lurk within all of us.’

          ‘…audiences must have been aware that they were to witness the birth of a new star. and Karloff does not disappoint. what wonders of expression [he] can bring into that totally false face, especially when compared with the stolid comic-strip vacuum offered by his several successors. It is almost true to say that every frame in which he appears makes a still picture worth hanging on the wall.’

          ‘…we begin to see the cleverness of the make-up designed by Jack Pierce. Any light which catches the face gives it new shadows and highpoints, all of them alarming.’

          ‘…something went out of my life a few years later when it could no longer be shown because the literary rights had lapsed.  When, in 1982, I began to buy films for Channel Four I negotiated its British television premiere; but meanwhile something had happened to the negative, and it seems that The Old Dark House can never again be seen in a print which glows so beautifully and with such satisfying depth, turning faces into gargoyles and shadowed corners into areas of tingling terror, as the one I saw, and saw again, in Bury in June 1947.’

          ‘Certainly Karloff himself brought sympathy, even tragic status, to his mad doctors and monsters; viewers were shocked by their plight and relieved when their suffering was over. But he was set his most difficult task when Universal in 1932 decided to film The Mummy.’

          ‘For the rest of the movie Karloff has been magically restored to something resembling normal human appearance, assuming you know a few very wrinkled humans. however he spends the remainder of his existence mooning over a young woman who resembles his lost love of 3000 years ago. Then Isis (or Osiris, or one of those gods) reduces him to dust, and we can all go home happy.’

         ‘...a macabre romance rather than a thriller. When Carl Laemmle first saw the rough cut, he must have wondered whether to release it. He did, with cuts, but its very moderate box office results temporarily halted Boris Karloff's early career. Fifty years later, The Mummy seems to contain its star's subtlest performance.’

          ‘The Invisible Man, edited with tremendous pace, is for the most part not only packed with fun, thrills and bewildering photographic tricks; it is a work of true eccentricity, and Hollywood did not allow many of those through its net.’

          ‘…it plays more as a black comedy with horror asides, and is narrated, in an eighteenth-century drawing room during a stormy night, by Mary Shelley, explaining to her husband and to Lord Byron how a sequel to her famous tale might run...’

          ‘…this had to be his own kind of horror film, something with more black comedy than outright terror, a tale peopled by eccentrics of his own choosing and decorated with little twists of black fancy in which he had come to delight...’

          ‘You wouldn't think so from the billing, but Thesiger was the real star of The Bride of Frankenstein. for his two performances under Whale's direction he richly deserved an Academy Award.’

          ‘Since Universal's battery of writers had already shown the Frankenstein monster safe and well after his apparently fatal adventure in the blazing windmill, it can surely not have been beyond their imaginative powers to resurrect the Count.’

          ‘…a neat if rather doleful little film, but despite careful attention it has the look of a support. what we are invited to enjoy is less a feast of horror than a number of mildly interesting hors d'oeuvres. The script is carefully balanced but never finds its batwings.’

          ‘In 1936 and 1937 a double bill revival of Frankenstein and Dracula played all over the world, and Universal executives were astounded when they came to tot up the enormous receipts. So in 1939 a big budget was expended on Son of Frankenstein, a few scenes of which were shot in colour before taste and a sudden economy drive dictated otherwise.’

          ‘...an expensive-looking piece full of robust barnstorming from actors who are upstaged throughout by massive gothic sets.  Honours were for once taken by Bela Lugosi as Ygor, the malevolent shepherd, who had been hung once already and can therefore have no further crime laid at his door.’

          ‘Police Inspector Krogh (Lionel Atwill in a much-parodied performance which may have been the origin of Dr Strangelove). manipulates in stiff Teutonic fashion a rather squeaky false arm.’

          ‘It was Karloff's last cinematic outing as the monster: he thought that in his fifties he was past it, and besides he despaired of finding the script that would provide him with the acting opportunities he had enjoyed in 1931 and 1935.’

          ‘Eight years went by before a sequel was envisaged to what had proved an only barely profitable grotesquerie, and even then one of the chief concerns was to re-use some of the expensive sets from the recently completed jungle melodrama Green Hell.’

          ‘Looked at in the cold light of a later day, The Mummy's Hand is mostly innocuous banter, and the monster moves so slowly as to be a creature of hilarity rather than horror, but it touched a raw nerve in a twelve-year-old-schoolboy.’

          ‘After this success Chaney dropped the 'Jnr' and had himself billed as 'the screen's master character actor'; at the same time his acting talent, modest in the first place, left him entirely, and his supremely wooden performances ruined a good many promising horror feasts. His father would have been ashamed.’

          ‘The Ghost of Frankenstein is economically set, flatly lit and dully shot, and it lacks actors who care. Hardwicke walks through his role with something like contempt; Chaney might as well be a block of wood, and even Lugosi is less impressive than before. But the old malarkey struck a responsive chord at the box office, and Universal badly wanted to make more Frankenstein stories. Alas, they only made them badly.’

          ‘.an irredeemable cheapjack effort. a gem of incompetence. the greatest mystery about Night Monster, apart from the matter of why it was made at all, is the billing. Bela Lugosi, who gets half a screen to himself, plays the butler. who not only didn't do it but has no part in the plot.’

          ‘[George Zucco] explains that he was not after all so badly hurt in the previous fracas: 'The bullet he fired into me only crushed my arm. The fire they thought consumed Kharis only seared and twisted his leg. Funny, when we last saw Kharis he was flat on his face in a pool of flaming oil. And Andoheb was not only shot full of holes but fell down a long flight of stone steps.’

          ‘...although Chaney claims to have complained bitterly about his limited role, a contract is a contract; he played Kharis twice more before all concerned lost interest.’

          ‘The only thing to be said for the arrant potboiler called The Mummy's Tomb is that it made a surprising amount of money and so kept the monster stalking for two further films of diminishing plausibility.’

          ‘.the performance you see on the screen (I later discovered) was not entirely his fault. This is the film in which the monster first stalks around with outstretched arms, because when the film was shot he was supposed to be blind, but for some reason all reference to this was removed in the editing.’

          ‘The geography of FMTWM is curious. Ludwig's old home was previously shown as a small chateau on flat ground just at the end of town, but it has now become a ruin on the thickly forested slope of a distant mountain. Moreover, when Talbot, having suffered an unfortunate change into his wolf-like persona, is chased by the townsfolk into it, the ruin turns out to have cellars filled with natural ice, even though down in the village it has been a summer evening.’

          ‘It was fast moving with a story set in America for easy assimilation by the juvenile audience. yet it achieved a unique sombreness from its Louisiana bayou setting, and its characterisation of the heroine as a melancholic depressive who longs above all to become one of the undead.’

          ‘Within its limits reasonably logical, and unusually plotted to say the least, Son of Dracula seems only to have been made at the wrong time. In America it was virtually ignored; in Britain the censor, very curiously, did not see fit even to award it the 'H' for horror certificate.’

          ‘.the script and treatment were too stodgy for anyone to care, despite the novelty of an invisible Great Dane.’

          ‘Although the Mummy invariably moved as stiffly as the Tin Man before Dorothy found the oil can, no small-part actor was ever found who could move fast enough to get out of the way...’

          ‘.individually the ghouls have worn out their welcome by now, but billed in all-star horrors they still have value at the box office. since from now on Universal's horrors would be presented somewhat tongue-in-cheek, it was thought unnecessary to provide them with logical or even watertight scripts.’

          ‘As for Karloff, in returning to the fold he brought nothing to the part of Dr Niemann except an agreeably sepulchral whisper.’

          ‘House of Frankenstein, despite its packed plot, is a somewhat boring film, with too much footage allocated to the gypsy girl, who is clearly doomed to meet a tragic fate from one or other of her unpleasant lovers.’

          ‘Curse has too great a lapse of the logic required even from a low-budget horror series on its last legs.’

          ‘Ah yes, the swamp, murmurs the audience to itself; but wasn’t that in New England?’

          ‘…this is Universal, where many apparent truths flourish for the duration of the movie, but whither as soon as the lights go up.’

          ‘It is a gem of ineptitude.  Its badness lies in its extremely flat handling and in the fact that the writers were not allowed to transfer to the screen the fun they must have had in cooking up its absurd plot.  As it is, the laughter it evokes is clearly unintentional.’

          ‘.a rather sad parody filled with reprises of half-baked vaudeville routines such as 'the disappearing body' and 'look out, he's behind you! When the mummy finally makes his unfrightening appearance it is in. a sort of turn-of-the-century one-piece bathing suit with facial wrappings amounting to little more than a yashmak, behind which the healthy features of stuntman Eddie Parker shine cheerfully.’

          ‘In fact, far from closing the book on Universal's monsters, [this] gave them all fresh life. At least [it] kept the images warm until a little studio by the banks of the Thames was ready to take them over and revitalise them for the hardened appetites of the fifties.’