Die, Monster, Die!

Indeed, The Monster was his 82nd film role at the time.

But once he settled into horror, he found that it became both steady and lucrative work for him, and he went on to appear in the Old Dark House, the Ghoul, the Black Cat, the Raven, the first two Frankenstein sequels, the Invisible Ray, the Walking Dead, the Climax, the Strange Door, Black Sabbath, the Terror, Die Monster Die, and a fantastic late career turn as a character based very much on the man himself in Targets.

And speaking of based on the man himself, he was the only one to truly deliver a line from the play Arsenic and Old Lace the way it was intended, discussing a man he killed for insulting his botched cosmetic surgery with the joke, "He said, I looked like Boris Karloff." Sadly, Targets was near the end of his life as well as his career, as a lifetime of heavy smoking gave him emphysema, which greatly diminished his lung capacity.

When he contracted bronchitis in the winter of 1968, it soon developed into pneumonia, and he passed away early in 1969 at the age of 81.