Killer elephants, tigers, snakes and lobsters?…Oh yeah!

Last year, I co-wrote an article about “killer creature” man vs. animal themed stories in vintage men’s adventure magazines for HORRORHOUND, a nicely-produced periodical about horror and science fiction movies,…

Men’s adventure magazine covers that stoked “ophidiophobia” (and some ophidiophilia)…

Most species of snakes are harmless. Relatively few people, at least in the United States, ever have personal encounters with snakes that pose a real threat to humans. Nonetheless, many…

Some classic “killer creature” covers on men’s pulp adventure magazines…

From the early 1950s to the early ‘60s, men’s pulp adventure magazines regularly featured cover paintings showing bloody confrontations between humans and various types of land and sea creatures. I…

Snakes in Men’s Pulp Mags: scarier than Snakes on a Plane

There’s a subgenre of pre-World War II pulp magazines called “weird menace” which features good-looking women and men being menaced (and often tortured) by evil villains and freaks. There’s a…

Why’d it have to be snakes, Indy? ‘Cause they’re frakkin’ scary!

Remember that snake scene in the original Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)? Indiana (Harrison Ford) looks down at the slithering mass in the “Well of Souls”…