Our Horror Movie Column is Nominated For An Award!

On February 26th, nominations for the 15th annual Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards were announced. Since 2002 the Rondo Awards have honored the best is horror cinema, television and literature, including current productions, classic films and film preservation.

Bay of the Living Dead, BrokeAssStuart.com’s twice a month horror movie column, has been nominated in the Best Columnist category (Please vote for us! Learn how at the bottom of the post).

Rondo Award statues await this year’s winners.

The Rondo Awards are named after Rondo Hatton (1894-1946) a sports journalist who became an unexpected star of horror movies during the last two years of his life. The circumstances of Hatton’s brief but memorable film career were the result of a disease which left his head, face and extremities severely disfigured.

Rondo Hatton on screen.

Ironically, Hatton was a track and football star in high school and was voted the handsomest boy in his class. It was during his service in World War I that the symptoms for Acromegaly, the disease which eventually killed him first developed.

Handsome Rondo Hatton as a young man.

Hatton continued working as a sports writer for the Tampa Tribune in Florida, when in 1936 he decided to move to Hollywood to pursue a film career. His now disfigured face enabled him to get steady work as an extra and in bit parts in villainous or horrific roles.

In 1944 he won a supporting role in The Pearl of Death, one in a series of Sherlock Holmes films produced by Universal Studios. Universal was THE horror studio, having been the home to classic chillers such as Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolfman and The Mummy.

Studio suits decided to promote Hatton as a horror leading man. He starred in two chillers sans make-up, House of Horrors (1945) and The Brute Man (1946), his swan song. On February 2, 1946, Rondo Hatton died of a heart attack which was caused by his illness. He was 51 years old.

Decades later his colleagues, appearing at horror movie fan conventions, remembered Hatton as a kind and gentle man who accepted his fate and never complained.

The Rondo Awards are named after Hatton to honor his life and to help insure that he is not forgotten.

We at BrokeAssStuart.com are honored that Bay of the Living Dead recieved a nomination at this year’s Rondo Awards. We hope that in attracting readers from the worlds of horror fandom to our website, we will also bring new readers to the other stories we post here–stories which are about the social justice causes near and dear to our hearts.

Voting in the Rondo Awards is open to the general public. We hope that you will vote for us.

You can peruse the Rondo Ballot here–email your votes for Best Columnist: Bay of the Living Dead (and whatever other items that tickle your fancy) to taraco@aol.com

Help us win this thing!

BOO!