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THIS IS NOT A DEFINITIVE look at American Monster magazines. It is mostly a deeply nostalgic display of some of the American Monster magazines that I had known, collected, read and cherished in my earliest adolescent years (1961 to 1963) when I was aged twelve to fourteen.

The years of the 1950s had seen a huge swell of interest in science fiction movies. But by about 1960 or so, that fad had slowly burned itself out as the SciFi movies became more and more derivative and were usually made on smaller and smaller budgets. As the audiences for SciFi movies began to dwindle, a much older fad experienced a resurgence. This began when Universal Studios released for television their large collection of horror movies that they had produced and released throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolfman, The Mummy, The Invisible Man and their innumerable sequels, were now on display but only if you lived in a market area where you could watch them. I was very much aware of these movies, but seeing them at that time seemed impossible. Still, I was incedibly curious about them So, in 1961 while on a family vacation trip, when I looked up and down some magazine racks I saw, on several occasions four different magazines, all dedicated to this "new craze" (to me then, anyway); I just had to have them. I then became the owner of Horror Monsters #4, Mad Monsters #4, Famous Monsters #14. and The Castle of Frankenstein #1. Then, when I returned home, to my great pleasure I found that movies from this huge library of horror classics were being broadcast by a local television station. My neighborhood friends had already watched one: the original 1931 production of "Frankenstein", the movie that had made Boris Karloff into an overnight star! I was in heaven.

Those old Universal Studios' monster movies created a fervor among my friends and me. We watched, talked, anticipated and thought about little else other than those monster movies for the next couple of years. That was, of course, except for our beloved monster magazines which we in turn also bought, read, studied, reread, perused, thought about, talked about, and collected for about two years until they too faded into our past.

Listed here are some of the monster magazines I had read and collected. Not all of them (i.e., every possible issue), just the ones that had the greatest impact on us. These magazines, like the Classics Illustrated comics that can be found elsewhere on my website, are stored in CBR format and require an app to be read. The app is free and can be found at this link. On Apple products you'll need to buy an inexpensive app from their App Store. I hope you do because these things need to be preserved and read!