Antics on the Web: Free (Official!) Full-Length
Horror Movies on YouTube? Yes Please!
by Robert Brouhard
What do The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, The Loved Ones, The Sender, The Colossus of New York, Circle of Eight, Beneath, The Deadly Bees, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, In Dreams, Shanks, Ghost Team One, and Rumpelstiltskin all have in common? They are all available free on YouTube thanks to Paramount Pictures Corporation starting their own channel there called The Paramount Vault.
Many of these were on Netflix and other pay services before, but now anyone can watch them online (if it’s rated R, like Bound, you’ll have to have a YouTube account).
Sure, I am going to be checking out fun sci-fi/horror thrillers like I Married a Monster From Outer Space (a must-see almost-B+ 1958 body-snatcher film that could easily be played as a comedy including a twin-beds honeymoon… but still manages to be entreatingly creepy), but The Loved Ones has been on my To-Watch list for a while and I’m quite happy it is on there. And yes, I’ll be turning on the live-action Masters of the Universe film with my kids and the “American Ninja” series after they go to bed.
There are over 80 films on there right now, and it looks like films like Rosemary’s Baby, World War Z, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers might be added soon, but The Paramount Vault YouTube site also includes, “… Many Of Our All Time Favorite Moments,” and just clips from those may be all we see. If their current videos become popular, who knows what they’ll add?
Sure, there are a lot of bootleggers uploading rare films to YouTube willy-nilly, but their copies usually look pretty crubby. The official ones actually look nice on my computer, and I am looking forward to watching some of them.
I hope other studios get involved with releasing official free full-length films on YouTube and hopefully we’ll all get to see more too-unpopular-for-physical-releases. There are hundreds of thousands of hours of B-horror films from the last 50+ years I’d love to see become available, so I’ve got my fingers crossed for more.
“Antics on the Web” is a Cemetery Dance Online exclusive series of articles about horror that can be found on the Internet. Robert Brouhard is a freelance writer and an active member of the Horror Writers Association.
