The Horror of It All

First, there was the sound--a long, groaning, creaking sound that could only issue forth from a centuries-old coffin lid.

Then came the music--an eerie, bass-driven tune punctuated by shrill, specific guitar notes and accentuated by strings and, perhaps, a harp.

Then the string of black & white images from classic Universal horror films like Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man and The Mummy flowed across the screen.

Finally, the title card bearing the freehand-drawn visage of a man with long, flowing hair, a formal top hat, bulging eyes and a smile that seemed to show dozens (if not hundreds) of razor-sharp teeth displayed the name of the program as the voiceover man (initially Carl Greyson, later Marty McNeely, both newscasters handling the late shift) announced the evening's feature presentation.

So began nearly every showing of Creature Features, the weekly WGN horror-movie showcase that stirred the imaginations--and haunted the dreams--of children and adults alike from its premiere on Saturday, September 19, 1970 until May 1976. (The very first and very last movies shown on Creature Features were one and the same: the Tod Browning/Bela Lugosi version of Dracula.)

In my memory, such as it is, Creature Features lasted at least two years longer than that, and I could swear that I ran across a late-night version of it that eschewed the usual montage and just presented the title card with the line drawing of Lon Chaney from London After Midnight (ironically, a long-lost silent film that therefore could never be shown on Creature Features--or anywhere else, for that matter) and the spooky Henry Mancini theme lifted from Blake Edwards' Experiment in Terror (also ironically, not a horror film and therefore something that would never be shown on Creature Features).

Regardless of how long the show was actually on the air, it made a deep impression on me and much of my generation growing up in Chicago in the 1970s. It also gave me my first introduction to many of the classics of the genre--in addition to the aforementioned Universal horror classics of the '30s and '40s, Creature Features also ran selections from Warner Bros. (Doctor X), Columbia (The Black Room), 20th Century Fox (The Lodger) and even Japan's Toho Studios (the Americanized version of the original Godzilla and my all-time favorite daikaiju classic, War of the Gargantuas).

As I've mentioned before, I was lucky enough to have grown up in Chicago, where we had many TV stations with lots of programming time to fill, even in the days before all stations ran all 24 hours. (In the 1970s, most stations were off the air by one o'clock in the morning.) And what was one of the most cost-effective way to fill that time? Movies. That meant just about every channel had at least one regularly scheduled movie program. Some, like WGN, had several. So we were lucky enough to have more than one horror-film showcase on the air at the same time.

In fact, the other high-profile monster show in Chicago in the 1970s officially started just one day before Creature Features first stalked the airwaves. Well, sort of.

That Friday night, September 18, 1970, WFLD launched their own horror movie showcase, Screaming Yellow Theater. At first, it didn't really have a host--not even a line drawing standing in for a host a la Creature Features. It just had the voice of staff announcer Jerry G. Bishop doing a Bela Lugosi impersonation--appropriate enough, since the first feature that first night was Ghosts on the Loose, an East Side Kids comedy with Lugosi as a menacing guest star.

According to Chicago TV Horror Movie Shows: From Shock Theatre to Svengoolie, the very entertaining history of our fair city's horror movie showcases by Ted Okuda and Mark Yurkiw, Bishop continued hosting Screaming Yellow Theater off-screen for several months, maintaining the Lugosi impression while adding smart-ass comments about the movies, which weren't nearly up to the fare over on WGN. There were a few certified classics, like the original Night of the Living Dead and Mario Bava's Black Sunday and some unsung gems like Night Tide (starring a young Dennis Hopper) or The Haunter Strangler (starring an old Boris Karloff), but most of the movies on Screaming Yellow Theater were low-budget, no-star garbage that needed all the help they could get. And come that following summer, boy would they get it. When Bishop finally debuted on-screen as Svengoolie, Screaming Yellow Theater completely stopped being about the movies and was now all about the green-haired hippy vampire with the Transylvanian accent. the movies were still there and still bad, but the jokes were worse, which made them that much funnier. Bishop was basically doing stand-up prop comedy (most of the props being rubber chickens hurled at him whenever he made a bad pun, which was often) on a decidedly shoestring budget. He was also obviously having a blast with the gig.

For all good things, though, there is an end, and the end for Svengoolie came rather unceremoniously in the first week of September 1973, when the new owners of WFLD decided to save some money (like they were spending a whole lot of cash on the show anyway), cancel Svengoolie and use the horror host they already had on their payroll in Cleveland and Detroit: The Ghoul, successor to Ghoulardi (a.k.a. Ernie Anderson, father of director P.T. Anderson).

I tuned in the next Saturday, fully expecting to be entertained by the green-haired hippy vampire telling corny jokes and making silly puns, only to find a new guy dressed as a gangster and toting a Tommy gun. (Because he was on in Chicago now. And we think gangsters are hilarious.) At least that's how my nine-year-old mind recorded the event. (Remember what I said above about memory.)

Whatever actually happened that night, three things were verifiably clear: Svengoolie was gone. The Ghoul was here. And the Ghoul was just not amusing to me. (Apparently, it wasn't just me. He only stayed on Chicago airwaves for a few months, though he's been on and off the air in Cleveland and Detroit ever since and even has his own website. More power to him.)

Even as good things end, other good things begin. After a few years without either Creature Features and Screaming Yellow Theater and only a few quieter, hostless shows (one of them ironically named Creature Feature and even more ironically on WFLD, former home of Svengoolie) to feed our need for monster mashes, WFLD changes ownership again--in fact, changed back to the previous ownership, which wanted its own horror host again. That's how they wound up with Son of Svengoolie (a.k.a. Rich Koz) in June 1979. That lasted until 1986, but there was life in the ol' Goolie yet: he rose from the dead on New Year's Eve 1994 and has been showing bad movies (and telling worse jokes) ever since.

So this weekend when the 40th anniversaries of Creature Features and Screaming Yellow Theater are upon us, raise a pint (of blood) in celebration and watch a bad movie. Something with Bela Lugosi would do just fine.