Rather than continue to waste valuable time scouring Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram for other people’s uploads of newspaper ads and listings for horror, science fiction, and fantasy movies, I decided to start getting my own.

And what better place to start than at the very beginning? Here is what appears to be the very first teaser ad for the San Francisco Bay Area release of Universal’s Dracula. The movie considered to have started it all. Without the financial and artistic success of Dracula, there would have been no Frankenstein. No Universal Monsters.

Because what Dracula helped to prove was that a horror movie with an actual supernatural element, one that did not offer a rational explanation for all of the film’s strange and otherworldly events, could and would make a lot of money.

Ladies and gentlemen, the monsters had begun to arrive…