Special effects guru Stan Winston passed away Sunday, June 15th, 2008, at age 62, after a long struggle with multiple myeloma. Winston straddled the worlds of makeup and visual effects, contributing to such horror films as Dead & Buried, The Monster Squad, and Interview with the Vampire. Over the course of his career, he was nominated for ten Academy Awards, winning four of them (one each for Aliens and Jurassic Park and two for Terminator 2).

Word came in from Jim Clatterbaugh over on the Classic Horror Film Board (no relation to Classic-Horror.com) that Hazel Court, a actress who added so much to the horror genre in the course of her career, passed on this morning, April 15th, 2008, at the age of 82. Her autobiography, Hazel Court: Horror Queen, was set to make its United States premiere at the Monster Bash convention in June of this year. No word yet on how this sad news affects that.

Over at the Classic Horror Film Boards (no relation to Classic-Horror.com), Tom Weaver reported that Ben Chapman, the actor who performed as the Creature in the on-land sequences of Creature from the Black Lagoon, died this morning (February 21st) of undisclosed causes. He was 82.

Ben's death has particular meaning here at Classic-Horror, because he was one of the first interviews we ran, all the way back in 2002. You can read it here.

Roy Scheider, the actor who famously exclaimed "We're gonna need a bigger boat" in Jaws (1975), died Sunday at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences hospital. He was 75 years old. The cause of death has not been disclosed, but Scheider had been undergoing treatment for multiple myleoma for the past two years at the University's Myeloma Institute for Research and Therapy. Scheider made his feature debut in a horror film, Del Tenney's 1962 vengeance-from-beyond-the-grave romp The Curse of the Living Corpse.

As you likely know by now, Maila Nurmi, aka Vampira the first television horror host, passed away January 10, 2008 of natural causes. Although she gave much to the horror community -- if the invention of the late night horror host concept wasn't enough, she also co-starred in the immortal Plan 9 from Outer Space as Bela Lugosi's dead wife -- she did not have very much money in the end. Currently, a number of fans are working to get Nurmi interred at Hollywood Forever cemetery, where she rightly belongs.