House of Monsters – review

Director: Dawn Brown

Release date: 2012 & 2015

Contains spoilers

House of Monsters started life as a one-off stop motion short (embedded below). This concentrated on the Mummy but did feature a vampire. The animation was dialogue free but had a charm and won several festival awards.

Cut forward to 2015 and a series (currently at two episodes length) has been created by Dawn Brown. It is now narrated, by Christopher Lloyd, and is available at vimeo. A lot of the character design had changed (most noticeably for Frankenstein’s Monster). The second episode is called Frank and the Zombie Girl and features the Monster, as well as carrying forward a relationship that first appeared in the episode before.

in the sun

Episode 1 is called Fun in the Sun and is vampire centric. Following an electrical glitch the digital alarm clock in the vampire’s coffin resets and the vampire is woken when it is still daytime. He rises and burns. Rushed into the Mad Doctor’s lab the Doctor finds a cure for vampire sunburn. This involves swaddling the vampire in bandages and actually gives the vampire immunity to sunlight.

bandaged vampire

That is all well and good, but the vampire takes advantage of his new daywalker status by terrorising the village (with practical joke level annoyances). The villagers actually think they are under attack from the Mummy, due to the vampire’s bandaged state. The story is simple but the animation, and Lloyd’s rhymed dialogue makes this a worthwhile viewing.

7.5 out of 10. The imdb page for the original short is here and the imdb page for the series is here.