There is some debate as to what films constitute Universal Studios’ Classic Horror canon. For the first generation of fans, i.e. the baby boomer Monster Kids, it's those films that appeared on the Shock Theater & Son of Shock packages syndicated to local TV stations in the late 1950s, often presented by a horror host such as Vampira or Zacherley (here in Seattle it was The Count). But the Shock package, besides including films from Columbia Studios, contained a number of titles that could only generously be described as “horror adjacent” in order to fill out the numbers. So for this list, I've curated those titles out for the most part. I did include the six supernatural-tinged Inner Sanctum Mysteries, which Kim Newman has described perfectly as “straddling whodunnit and horror." I’ve also limited this list to those films produced during the '30s & '40s, with a few exceptions: I’ve included all of the Abbott & Costello meet the various monster flicks and gone into the 1950s to include the Creature trilogy, which is Universal's last great monster (well, until Jaws came along...). —Dan Doody, SIFF Programmer

Throughout the month of October, we're screening six of these Universal Monster movies, which you can haunt at siff.net.