"Good Night, Whatever You Are"

John Zacherle died, having just turned 98, on Thursday, October 27, a few days short of Halloween, a holiday he essentially personified.

First as Roland out of Philadelphia, and more famously as Zacherley, the Cool Ghoul, in New York, he was a pioneering TV Horror Host. He was among those who introduced the Universal Classics to the first generation of Monster Kids. He was a revelator and, through the years, he remained a touchstone, a direct link back to one’s own adolescence and our love of monsters. For those of us who never had the privilege of seeing him as a TV Host, we learned about him from Famous Monsters magazine and his horror-themed novelty records. Right to the end, he was proud of his accomplishments and still wore his long undertaker’s coat to convention appearances.

Zacherle had not seen the 1931 FRANKENSTEIN until he introduced the film on his show. He would go on to present most of the Universal Frankensteins over the years, and he would go on to a cameo as a TV weatherman in a Frankenstein film, Frank Henenlotter’ FRANKENHOOKER (1990).

To understand Zacherley’s impact and enduring importance, I urge you to read David Colton’s touching tribute on the Classic Horror Film Board.

See Zacherley in action on YouTube. 

Here is an obituary from The New York Times.

Shock Theater, Part Three Shock Theater Frankenstein

Horror Host Warren Reed of Seattle’s KTNT entertains his sidekick, “Frankie”, with a reading of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in this shot from the May 26, 1958 issue of Life, as the fabled picture magazine reported on the rise of the “ghoulish announcers” introducing horror movies on late night TV.

Right from the start, in October ’57, many stations running the Shock! Package dressed up their broadcasts with humorous voiceover introductions or short sketches with comically macabre hosts in cheap dungeon sets and flashing bulb castle labs, attended by rubber-mask assistants. As Monster mania began to spread across America, the Frankenstein Monster stomped front and center.

Things had been percolating for some time. Back in March of ‘57, Boris Karloff had guested on The Rosemary Clooney Show, with Clooney’s backup singers pulling a gag in Don Post Frankenstein masks. At the movies, Hammer Films had scored a major summer hit with The Curse of Frankenstein, and AIP was set to release I Was a Teenage Frankenstein by year’s end.

In September ‘57, the advertisers’ trade magazine Sponsor reported on deals that would “highlight the trend in the so-called ‘horror’ field. The befuddled columnist announced two new series in the works: “Screen Gems will produce a tv series called Tales of Frankenstein, with Boris Karloff as host. Hammer Films Productions is readying a half-hour Baron Frankenstein program… this is the same company that made Curse of Frankenstein for Warner Bros.” These turned out to be one and the same, a doomed transatlantic effort between Hammer and Screen Gem, Tales of Frankenstein, sans Karloff. The pilot, The Face in the Tombstone Mirror, was an uncomfortable hybrid of classic and contemporary movie Frankensteins, with Anton Diffring as a Cushing-style scientist and Don Megowan as a lumbering flattop Monster in Glenn Strange mode.

In February 1958, publisher Jim Warren posed in a Frankenstein mask on the cover of the inaugural issue of Famous Monster of Filmland, the instant touchstone title of the Monster Kid era, its punning editor, Forry Ackerman, providing a pitch-perfect mix of information and humor, a Horror Host in print. By year’s end, Zacherley, the most famous of all TV Horror Hosts, expanded his reach with Dinner with Drac, a pop-chart top ten novelty record. A rash of Frankenstein movies released in 1958 included Hammer’s The Revenge of Frankenstein, AIP’s Teenage Frankenstein and Teenage Werewolf meeting in How to Make a Monster, a schlockfest Frankenstein’s Daughter and Boris Karloff as the Monster-making Baron in Frankenstein 1970.

The monster fad, fanned by Shock! showings that brought the classic horror films to home screens, ruled through the Sixties, translating into an avalanche of merchandising that would include monster bubblegum cards, plastic kits, puzzles, toys, monster fan mags and comics. And on it went. Bobby Pickett scored a number one hit with Monster Mash and The Monster was reconfigured to comic effect in a sitcom, The Munsters.

Through it all, TV’s Horror Hosts, dubbed “harbingers of horror” by Life magazine, were the first-line facilitators who introduced countless new fans to classic horror movies. They made monsters cool and, for many of us First Generation Monster Kids, “Frankenstein” was the coolest monster of them all.

A comprehensive list of Horror Hosts, compiled by George Chastain.

Shock Theater, Part Two The Ratings Are In

There’s nothing to it: Find a tall employee, or stand some skinny guy up on a box, slap on a joke-shop Frankenstein facemask, throw in a rubber shrunken head — scary enough for ya? — and snap a photo with TV station execs. It’s a simple gag, and it gets you a spot in the October 12, 1957, issue of Sponsor, a trade magazine for Radio and TV advertisers.

The first real taste of horror business on TV harked back to the week of March 5, 1956, when WOR of New York booked King Kong on its Million Dollar Movie program, drawing what Sponsor called “the almost unbelievable rating of 79.7.” Could the Shock! collection pull those kinds of numbers? WABC pumped up the promotion. On October 5, 1957, Sponsor reported, “three ‘monsters’ are parading about the city, with a special one assigned to visit advertising agencies. There’s also a menu contest based on what viewers think is tasty monster fare.”

Frankenstein hit the air on October 13, inaugurating the Shock! series. The impact was measured in the October 19 issue of Sponsor: “First Trendex ratings on Screen Gems ‘Shock’ package were as startling as the film itself — they were enormous.” Focusing on premiere markets in New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, San Antonio and Los Angeles, “the thrillers 1) Boosted ratings anywhere from 38% to several hundred percent, and 2) Increased sets in use by 24% to 150%.” Citing “astronomical statistics”, Sponsor suggested that “The shocker may be the key to opening the advertising door in the late evening”, and noted “the current Screen Gems sponsors are no penny-whistle lot. It’s a pretty impressive list with such representation as American Chicle, Hit Parade cigarettes, P&G, Whitehall Pharmaceuticals, and Block Drug,”

The floodgates opened and new stations eagerly signed up. Reporting on December 14, Sponsor noted the addition of Cleveland, and WKBK Chicago’s first showing at 10PM on a Saturday night scoring, “a 24.7 rating and a 46.4 audience share, topping all competition in that time period.” Stations in Phoenix and Fort Worth tested earlier time slots, late afternoon or early evening, to determine “whether stations and sponsors would be content to confine this tempting fare to ‘fringe’ time.” One announcer reported tons of phone call from excited kids “who wanted to know when the next installment was coming.”

The Shock! package, and a follow-up Son of Shock offering 20 more titles, would be a syndication sensation and a ratings phenomenon for years to come, with new stations joining in well into the Sixties.

For all its corny simplicity, the October ’57 WABC photo stunt, masked Monster, shrunken head and all, shot on the eve of the first broadcast, marked a momentous occasion. It was the signal, true and clear, that the Monster Kid era was kicking into high gear.

Coming up next: Horror Hosts, Famous Monsters and The Shock Theater Frankenstein.

Read Shock Theatre, Part 1: Hard Sell Frankenstein

Shock Theater, Part One Hard Sell Frankenstein

San Francisco TV execs look on as Screen Gems’ Jerry Hyams and his towering silent partner, the Frankenstein Monster, set a macabre mood for this contract signing.

The gag shot, from the September 7, 1957 issue of Sponsor — a trade publication for radio and TV advertisers — celebrated KRON-TV’s buying up the Shock! syndication package that would bring classic horror films to television. Shock! offered a whopping 52 films — including Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Dracula, The Mummy, The Invisible Man and The Wolf Man — a treasure trove of mystery and monster movies that would find a whole new generation of fans.

Station managers did not have to be coerced with knives or stand-ins in Don Post Frankenstein masks. They were well aware of the teenage demographic packing drive-ins for AIP horror films, and Hammer Films of England had recently entered the field with a bang. Sponsor magazine contributing editor Joe Csida reported, “The overwhelming success at the box office of the New York Paramount Theater of the English-made ‘The Curse of Frankenstein’ is a fairly good sign that the ‘Shock’ package will be a rating success.”

By the time the series aired in October ’57, twenty-seven stations were aboard, including all the major TV markets. Flagship stations in New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco geared up for “National Weird Week”, an October coordinated launch that would, according to Sponsor, “telepremiere the Shock films, most likely with the original Boris Karloff Frankenstein.”

The Monster was a key player, with the 1931 Frankenstein spearheading the Shock! package and rubber mask ‘Frankensteins’ putting in personal appearances across the continent. And if it wasn’t already obvious that The Monster was your go-to guy, station managers who flipped opened the handsome, spiral-bound Shock! promotional catalog were treated to a pop-up cardboard cutout of The Monster.


It’s Shock Theater Frankenstein Week on Frankensteinia.
Coming up next: Frankenstein hits New York, and the ratings are in!

Frankensteinian : Le Robot (1970)

A reflection on technology, here’s a short sketch directed by Adrian Maben for a 1970 episode of Variances, the avant-garde arts and culture TV magazine broadcast over the French ORTF between 1969 and 1975. Set to electronic music, Le Robot's mime channels the Frankenstein Monster — and, perhaps, Caligari’s Cesar  — in black suit and neck bolts. The Frankenstein inspiration becomes even more evident when the Robot asserts itself at the end.

If you watch closely, you’ll figure out the tricks employed to sometimes startling effect by the unidentified performer. Typical of a time when television was often live and resolutely experimental, the whole sequence, some five and half minutes, is done in a single take, no editing.

Variances explored the arts of its time and its archives, bits and pieces of it available on the INA.fr (French National Institute of Audiovisual) includes performances and interviews with artists, musicians — Serge Gainsbourgh, for example — and writers and film directors — among them François Truffault and Jean-Pierre Melville. INA has over 350,000 videos on its sites, for free or pay viewing.

Scottish-born director Adrian Maben worked for the French ORTF in the early Seventies, and went on to create documentaries about Hieronymus Bosch and Magritte, the Helmut Newton film Frames from the Edge (1989) and his most famous work, Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii (1972).

The INA.fr site, and the Le Robot page.

Revealed! TV's Lost Frankenstein of 1957

Here’s a great find, courtesy of horror film expert and collector extraordinaire George Chastain. Previously circulating as a blurry thumbnail, here, at last, is a large, sharp image of Primo Carnera as TV’s Frankenstein Monster of 1957.

The show was NBC’s anthology series, Matinee Theater, beamed live and in color at noon — 3PM on the East Coast — out of Burbank’s Color City Studios.

Running from 1955 to 1958, Matinee Theater would tally an astounding 650 episodes, offering a mix of original teleplays and adaptations of classic novels. A generous selection of horror, science fiction and fantasy titles included Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Cask of Amontillado, Death Takes a Holiday, and The Bottle Imp. John Carradine played Dracula with a mustache and a Grampa Munster haircut.

A version of The Invisible Man was hailed by TV Guide as a television milestone for its pioneering special effects. In fact, the whole series was a bold experiment, with a rotating crew of directors producing five hour-long plays every week, testing the RCA color equipment along the way.

The Frankenstein episode’s Monster was played by Primo Carnera, one of the most storied and tragic sports figure of the Twentieth Century. Born in Northern Italy, stricken with acromegaly, he stood 6 feet 6 inches when he began his career as a circus wrestler, barnstorming through Europe, taking on all comers, sometimes fighting as many as 12 men in one day. Introduced to boxing, he was brought to America in the late Twenties by a shady promoter with mob ties. Soft-spoken, affable and utterly guileless, Carnera would be mercilessly exploited, embarking unawares or, at least, gullibly, in a world-spanning series of fixed fights, his opponents — fueled by cash or literally threatened at gunpoint — gamely walking into Carnera’s weak uppercuts and diving operatically for the count. The giant was a sensation, landing on the cover of Time Magazine in October of 1931 even as a newspaperman in England joked about his fights being “as rehearsed as a Shakespeare play”.

In February 1933, when one of his opponents died after being knocked out — the man had been ill and desperate for fight money — Carnera’s reputation peaked. In June, he became World Heavyweight Champion in a bout one reporter said was won “with an invisible punch”. Soon thereafter, feeling the heat and having squeezed everything they could out of the Amblin’ Alp, Carnera’s mobster handlers abandoned him, walking away with the millions he had earned. Now booked into real, up-and-up fights, Carnera was led to the slaughter. The sight of the once proud giant helpless, bloodied and battered, shocked America.

Humiliated, his career in shambles, Carnera returned to Italy where he was promptly hailed and exploited again, this time as a national hero by fascist leader Benito Mussolini. And yet again, Carnera would be abandoned to his own fate after losing badly in an ill-conceived showdown against Joe Louis, a fight that amounted to a veritable massacre.

On his own, surviving as best he could, even scavenging for food through the war years, Carnera made it back to the States after the war for an unlikely but spectacular comeback, becoming one of the most popular and beloved pro wrestler of the Fifties. Meanwhile, his boxing days proved rich fodder for drama, serving as inspiration for a novel turned into a 1956 Humphrey Bogart movie, The Harder They Fall, with Mike Lane as “Toro Moreno”. Lane, like Carnera, would go on to play Frankenstein’s Monster, opposite Boris Karloff in Frankenstein 1970 (1958). Another Carnera-inspired piece was Rod Serling’s Requiem for a Heavyweight, produced for television in 1956 with Jack Palance playing “Mountain McClintock”. A 1957 British TV version had Sean Connery in the role and a film adaptation from 1962 starred Anthony Quinn.

Carnera himself appeared in a handful of movies, notably turning up as one of the wrestlers in a tug of war with Mighty Joe Young (1949), even throwing a few punches at Joe, and he would go mano a mano with Steve Reeves in Hercules Unchained (1959).

Frankenstein director Walter Grauman hired Carnera for size, bulking him up further with torso padding and thick-soled monster boots. The New York Times reported that “Only television could round out the square head of Frankenstein”, with makeup men instructed to steer clear of Universal’s iconic design from the movies. NBC PR claimed that the Monster transformation required a tag team of five makeup artists working in shifts over a period of three hours. The Monster’s appearance, bald head crisscrossed with baseball stitches, is similar to that of Lon Chaney in the Tales of Tomorrow Frankenstein episode of 1952, and anticipates the makeup sported by Robert DeNiro in the 1994 film, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

The photograph at hand is actually from a dress rehearsal. It was circulated to newspapers on January 31, five days ahead of the February 5 broadcast. Note how the futuristic costume — called “a snowsuit” by one reporter — and somewhat reminiscent of the outfit James Arness wore in The Thing (1951), is unfinished, with threads hanging and material wrapped loosely around the arms. The collar of the outer garment appears to have been cut away, with flap pockets removed and front opening sewn shut. This clearly being a work in progress, the final makeup and costume might have been a bit different by showtime. It’s impossible to know for sure, as the Frankenstein episode, like much of early live television fare, is considered lost.

One might entertain the hope it can still be found as it was one of the few episodes of Matinee Theater to ever be rerun — on October 7, 1957 — meaning that there was, at least, a kinescope — film shot off a television monitor — made of the broadcast, perhaps even a videotape copy, the still-new technology first introduced in 1956.

See a video of director Walter E. Grauman reminiscing about his experiences in early television. In part one, at roughly 35:45, he talks about the Primo Carnera Frankenstein and recalls an on-air incident.

The Dark of the Moon, a rare surviving episode of Matinee Theater, starring Tom Tryon as a Warlock, and Gloria Talbott. Both would reunite in 1958 for I Married a Monster from Outer Space.

A very short documentary clip gives us a glimpse of Color City Studios and a rehearsal for an episode of Matinee Theater.

A complete and detailed episode listing for Matinee Theater.

A harrowing 1948 account of Primo Carnera’s life and career, by Jack Sher.

Related:
Tales of Tomorrow: Frankenstein’s Notorious TV Adventure