Nobody has mentioned my guy yet:
Sir Graves Ghastly ran Saturday afternoons on WJBK, TV2 in Detroit, from 1967 to 1982.
mmm
Nothing was local. The only thing I could get was out of NYC was Chiller, which had no host, but had the best opening graphic.
Me too. He was John Jones, KMTV program director.
When I was a child, the host was Gregore
In Dayton Ohio we had Dr. Creep and Shock Theater on Satueday afternoons. Saw many a Vincent Price movie, Godzilla and such in my teens.
We didn’t a local host, so I watched Night Owl Theater with Fritz the Night Owl out of Columbus, Ohio. Every Friday night was Double Chiller Theater.
Post #28, sir. (Do you remember his Blob character?)
DC Channel 20 had Count Gore de Vol, played by a fellow named Dick something (his last name has some Zs and Ys in it) who showed up everywhere on that station; characters a-plenty.
He was also in the 1990 re-make as practically the same character with the same dialogue.
Dick Dyszel, who’s still alive at 77. I have a link to a Wikipedia entry about horror hosts in post 25 in this thread. You can look up facts like that in that link.
Dick Dyszel
Mr. Dyszel was one of those guys who were the backbone of local TV. They were everywhere on their channel. Baltimore’s version was Stu Kerr who was the local Bozo the Clown franchise although I don’t think he ever did a monster movie show in Charm City.
A UHF channel, out of Milwaukee.
I forget the call letters.
No host, & it leaned heavy on Godzilla & Gamera, plus Kong.
Chiller Theatre. I didn’t watch the movies, but I remember the creepy hand. I also remember when my brother pointed out the sixth finger.
I think that ultra-local programming is a hair before my time. What I remember is USA Up All Night with Rhonda Shear and Gilbert Gottfried. Gilbert would play cheesy sex movies, Rhonda would play cheesy B horror movies.
Milwaukee is still doing midnight showings of Rocky Horror Picture Show as well. IIRC they’re down to once a month, but it’s been going for almost 50 years now.
Yep, me too- I was big fan of the scary stuff as a kid. A perfect Saturday afternoon for 8 or 9 year old me might have been building one of the old Aurora monster kits while watching Sir Graves’ show. I liked the art gallery of scary drawings kids sent in that he would showcase on the show— surprised I never sent one of my own drawings in.
On the television show SCTV, which was about a very cheaply run local television station, there was a character named Floyd Robertson (who was played by Joe Flaherty). The station was so cheap that they couldn’t afford to hire someone else to play the host to their late night horror movie show. Instead, they had Floyd Robertson play the host Count Floyd, which they supposedly avoided mentioning and tried to get the audience to not notice. SCTV was a television show which originally was strictly shown in Canada and later showed both in Canada and the U.S.
I remember him mostly as Captain 20 since I wasn’t old enough to stay up for creature feature. It was a real treat to see him in Rifftrax episodes when he appeared in Don Dohler movies like “Alien Factor” and “Galaxy Invader.”
I need to research The Alien Factor, that title is jogging some serious gray matter.
We. LOVED Elvira, and Joe Bob Briggs.
Years and years earlier, we had two local hosted ‘horror movie’ shows. My brothers and I would stay up late to watch those old Godzilla and cold-war-radiation-giant things with ‘Baron Daemon’ - a very popular ‘bloody buddy’ fumbling vampire who went on to host a kiddie afternoon show AND a teenage dance party show…The other one was a creepy Saturday afternoon creature feature hosted by ‘Dr. E. Nick Witty’ and ‘Epal’. … what fun times!
Does anyone remember ‘Commander USA’ on the Saturday afternoon USA channel? He was a hoot. (He looked like one of the Watchmen - maybe an inspiration?). They showed some Hammer horror movies I’ve never seen since: ‘Simon King of the Witches’ and ‘Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter’ …and others.
Growing up in NJ we had Chiller and I know I saw the intro to Creature Feature but I am not sure if that was a regular thing at the time.
We also had the 4:30 movie daily at 4:30 (natch) which had theme weeks. My favorites were Monster Week, Godzilla Week, Sci Fi week and Planet of the Apes week.
It wasn’t weekly but annually, WWOR Channel 9 would play King Kong, Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young on Thanksgiving and three Godzilla movies the Friday after. I looked forward to that every year.
When we got cable we got Channel 29 from Philadelphia. They showed horror/sci fi movies every Saturday afternoon. I don’t remember what the show was called, if it even had a name, I just remember the intro showed a clip of Attack of the the Eye Creatures (the extra the is not a mistake) with the two bubbly looking monsters approaching a car with a heartbeat sound effect.