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| One of my own little horrors. Image: Teece Aronin |
Horror movie hosts first sprang from the earth when a package of aging Universal horror films was made available to syndicated television stations and someone had the diabolically brilliant idea that the movies be hosted.
By the late sixties many local television markets had had at least one of these hosts. Vampira in L.A. was likely the first. Then there were Zacherley, Morgus, Ghoulardi, the Ghoul, and an endless string of others - many now lost to the annals of time.
And most of the original programming is lost, too, because the broadcasts were often aired live but not recorded. Worse, some were recorded then recorded over by stations on a budget. So even for those of us who are "of a certain age," most of those programs are but dimly lit memories in the spook-house of the mind.
The hosts' personalities ran the gamut from formal and stiff to bouncing-off-the-dungeon-walls-zany. Better yet, they were often sarcastic. Elvira, Mistress of the Dark was sarcastic and tantalizing, saucy, and sexy.
Among my favorite hosts was Sir Graves Ghastly who aired in Detroit, Cleveland, and D.C. He straddled the qualities of formality and sarcasm, once summing up the merits of that afternoon's movie by sneering that it had been "smuggled in in a cheese bag."
One nice thing about Sir Graves was that he was a little scary but not very scary. On that score he let me down only once when I had a nightmare about him climbing through my bedroom window. That dream scared me because mine was a second story bedroom, so it followed that if Sir Graves was climbing through my window, he wasn't just looking to come in from the rain.
Sir Graves "lived" in Detroit, in a castle off the John Lodge Freeway. Elements like that ignited my imagination. I remember riding down the John Lodge in the back seat of the family car watching for that castle. There's no better fun when you're a nerdy nine-year-old than looking for a castle beside a freeway in Detroit.
And we "kiddies," as Sir Graves called us (he also called us, dear hearts), quickly figured out that he and all the funny peripheral characters inhabiting his world were played by one man. His name was Lawson Demming. But as crazy as I was about Sir Graves et al, I was just as interested in what I might find if I crawled through my family's black and white Zenith console television to peek behind his wingback chair.
There are still horror movie hosts, even some from the old school. I'll just have to get savvy enough to track them down in the haunts to which time and technology have driven them - like wolves from the woods.
One has fared very well, though. He is Svengoolie, whose alter ego, Rich Koz, replaced the show's original host almost 40 years ago. “Svengoolie” is syndicated nationally via MeTV, but I haven't quite figured out how to access the channel. I think I'll ask a kid to do it in which case I'll be hooked up in no time.
So, that same technology that nearly ended them has also given the hosts new homes. If I look hard enough, I'll find them lurking amid the vaults of public access television and slinking around the headstones on social media sites.
If I could watch the original shows again, I would want to watch them as they were originally presented, in ultra-brief blocks interrupted by rivers of commercials for local businesses with yammering salesmen. L.A.'s car salesman supreme, Cal Worthington was generally accompanied by his "dog, Spot” who was usually a bear, a tiger or a chimpanzee.
I know . . . It only made sense in L.A.
