NIGHT OF THE HORROR HOSTS
T he joke was on our parents, really.
They fretted endlessly about the kinds of friends we were hanging out with. Were they future hoodlums? Were they destined to become upstanding members of the community?
But while Mom and Dad were scrutinizing our flesh-and-blood buddies, they never dreamed of checking out our cathode ray pals — the ghouls and gravediggers who slunk across our flickering blackand-white TV screens late Saturday nights, long after our parents had gone off to blissful dreams.
It was then, the weekend witching hour, when local TV stations from coast to coast unleashed their latenight horror hosts. Most of them were men; virtually all of them lurked in minimalist TV studio dungeons, cackling and rumbling mordant introductions to wellworn horror movies like The Crawling Eye and The Thins with Two Heads.
If you lived in Indianapolis in the 1960s, ’70s, or ’80s, your parents would have been aghast at Sammy Terry (shown at left), a ghoul with the face of Death from and a voice that invoked Vincent Price with a touch of Liberace. Parents in New Orleans would have shaken their heads sadly at the bizarre laboratory experiments of Morgus the Magnificent — a psycho mix of Mr. Wizard and Dr. Frankenstein — whose “lectures” bookended vintage horror flicks.
