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"Greetings, My hokey hucksters of horror" |
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-- Dr. Shock, Mad Theatre |
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In the 1950s the new medium of television created such a
demand for programming that it wasn't long before the movie
studios (who first thought TV a threat to them) began selling
the broadcast rights to hundreds of films just sitting in their
storage vaults. One such package of films (syndicated by Screen
Gems in 1957) was called "Shock!" and included such old horror
flicks as the Universal Studio productions of Dracula (1931),
Frankenstein (1931), Son of Frankenstein (1939), Son of Dracula
(1943), Dead Man's Eyes (1944), Weird Woman (1944), and Night
Monster (1942). A by-product of all these horror film offerings
was the invention of a spooky TV horror show host who visited
our living rooms around the Witching Hour on Friday and Saturday
nights dressed in all sorts of creepy costumes (monsters,
hunchbacks, witches, vampires, werewolves and mad scientists.)
Their job was to encourage viewers to come back week after week
to watch scary movies and hopefully in doing so raise some
advertising revenue from local merchants who chose to sponsor
the shows. And for a time, from the late 1950s through the
1980s, the late night cackles and moans of horror show hosts
were quite a success in all the major cities in the country. The
following section is a summary of the prominent horror show
hosts (both male and female) to have graced the old TV tube
since the fifties. This web page also contains a "Horror Show
Hosts at a Glance" section which quickly identifies many of the
horror show hosts seen across America as well as the actor
behind the make-up and when and where the program aired.
"Unpleasant Dreams!"
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