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7 scary movies featuring actors from The Addams Family
The classic sitcom was ooky and fun but these horror flicks are downright creepy.
The original Addams Family sitcom is so full of jokes that it can be enjoyed by any comedy fan just in it for the laughs. But the macabre gags also appeal to audiences who like a good scare every now and then.
While all the actors in The Addams family were funny, and mostly appeared in other comedies, they did act in a few genuinely creepy, gory and sometimes downright horrifying films. Here are seven scary movies featuring members of the Addams family.
1. House of Wax
A decade before her iconic portrayal of Morticia Addams, Carolyn Jones played Cathy Gray in the classic Vincent Price horror film House of Wax. Price plays a brilliant sculptor who opens a macabre wax museum with a dark secret after his first gallery is burned to the ground. Jones plays an important supporting role who helps star Phyllis Kirk find out the unsettling truth behind the new exhibit.
2. Night Life
In the 1989 zombie flick Night Life — not to be confused with the 1989 vampire flick Nightlife — John Astin plays a cantankerous mortician named Verlin Flanders. His nephew, Archie (played by Scott Grimes, fresh off the first two Critters movies) helps out at the mortuary. When Archie’s jock bullies are killed in a car accident, a lightning strike brings them back to life as zombies. Though it has plenty of funny moments, some intentional and some not, Night Life also has the creepiness and gore needed for any good zombie movie.
3. Poor Pretty Eddie
The 1975 grindhouse movie Poor Pretty Eddie, also called Redneck County or Heartbreak Motel, stars Leslie Uggams as a famous singer whose car breaks down near a rundown motel filled with the worst kinds of people, as she soon finds out. Ted Cassidy plays a towering, soft-spoken man, Keno, who works for the motel’s owners. Michael Christian, Shelley Winters and Slim Pickens round out the cast of this bonkers, creepy and outrageously violent film.
4. Human Experiments
Speaking of Seventies exploitation films, 1979’s Human Experiments made the “video nasty” list of banned movies in the U.K. What it lacks in gore and violence it makes up for in creepy psychological horror and bugs — lots of bugs. Jackie Coogan plays a corrupt sheriff who sentences a country singer, played by Linda Haynes, to multiple murders she didn’t commit. The titular experiments are carried out by a sadistic prison doctor who tries to break down the inmates’ real personalities and give them new ones.
5. Blood Frenzy
Two decades after sporting pigtails as Wednesday Addams, Lisa Loring rocked a totally Eighties 'do in the slasher movie Blood Frenzy, which more than lives up to its name. It follows Loring and five other troubled individuals who are brought to the desert by their psychiatrist. Naturally, things go horribly wrong when one patient becomes violent and begins attacking the rest. Each kill is bloodier than the last leading to a particularly gory finale.
6. She Devil
The 1957 film She Devil takes the era’s penchant for well-meaning but ultimately ill-fated doctors performing experimental procedures in a different direction. Instead of creating a grotesque monster, Dr. Dan Scott (Maverick’s Jack Kelly) brings a beautiful woman on her death bed (Mari Blanchard) back to life. Unfortunately, the new injection has a few side effects, including the ability to change hair color at will, invincibility and homicidal tendencies. Blossom Rock, a few years before playing the joyously violent Grandmama Addams, appears as Dr. Scott’s housekeeper.
7. The Brood
Felix Silla, who brought Cousin Itt to life on The Addams Family in one of his very first roles, had a long career embodying all kinds of creatures, aliens and even robots. He was an Ewok in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, put on the robot suit as Twiki in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and played one of the small but horrifying creatures in David Cronenberg’s 1979 film The Brood. The film has all the scares, gore and twisted bodily functions that Cronenberg fans know well from later films like Videodrome and The Fly.
40 Comments
In my lifetime, the eighties are the last decade to have a visual identity.
Keep the Halloween Themed stuff coming!!
