There are a handful of Three Stooges shorts that have scary stories. When I was a kid watching these films, I saw them way more often than I saw any other horror movies. They were just scary enough to introduce me to the pleasures of horror films.
One of the earliest of these is a short with the title Spook Louder. The Stooges end up in a house that is supposedly haunted. They encounter three criminals dressed in Halloween costumes. The guy in the skeleton costume was the most frightening character in the movie. At one point Curly is “chased” by a balloon that is attached to his jacket. The balloon is round and has a frightening face drawn on it. The balloon gave the skeleton guy a run for his money as the most scary character in the movie for this little boy.
The Stooges upped their game for fright in the short, If A Body Meets a Body. This film features a parrot that ends up inside of a skull. When it walks across the room, the feet look more like they are rolling than they look like bird feet walking. Later, the parrot starts flying and grabs a white sheet. It has a ghostly appearance. It flies around creating a lot of excitement for both me and the Stooges.
The short, Idle Roomers is notable for a wolfman character that was just as scary as any of the Universal studios werewolf characters. The look of the makeup had a young Art Wheeler convinced that this is what this guy really looked like. It also features a mirror scene between Curly and the ghoul that is like the Duck Soup mirror scene.
All the shorts I’ve mentioned so far featured Curly as the third stooge. One of my all-time favorite Stooge shorts is The Ghost Talks, which is a Shimp short. The boys are movers and they are at what appears to be a castle on a stormy night. They encounter a suit of armor that is possessed by the spirit of Peeping Tom. He is waiting for the ghost of Lady Godiva to come through. The Stooges also encounter “Red Skeleton”. This was just the right amount of scary for a young kid. It also had the sex appeal for a little boy just learning about Lady Godiva.
