The Saturday afternoon horror movie was a staple in the lives of many young Americans during the last half of the 20th century. The movies presented were rarely anything better than a schlocky, B-Grade horror movie with most of the good stuff (blood, gore, profanity, and nudity) edited out. But we sat there, and wasted perfectly good afternoons in front of the television.
In some areas of the country, these movies were introduced by hosts who appeared throughout the telecast and were usually more entertaining than the dreck they were presenting. Cleveland had Ghoulardi and later The Ghoul, Chicago still has Svengoolie, and during the 1980’s, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark made the horror host a national phenomenon.
Here in the Metro Detroit area, Sir Graves Ghastly held court on WJBK for 15 years in the 1960’s and 70’s. Ghastly was no longer on the air when I started spending Saturdays glued to my parents’ television, but thanks to WXON-TV 20, the Thriller Double Feature was still showing horror movies until the early 1990’s before college football became the Saturday television juggernaut that it is today.
Outside of playing terrible movies every Saturday, the TV 20 Thriller Double Feature also featured this wonderful intro:
You may recognize the background music as Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love,” but as far as I know, Jimmy Page or Robert Plant never knew that their music was being introduced to Metro Detroit youths through bad horror movies.
What I remember most about the Thriller Double Feature (along with that amazing intro) was that no matter how bad the movies featured might be, they regularly scared the hell out of me. To be fair, I was still in elementary school when I started watching, so seeing vampires, zombies, and trolls going on a rampage was pretty scary in my pre-teen mind.
Still, I came back pretty much every week, and sat through movies like Troll, Piranha, or any number of B-movies, while keeping an ear out for my parents, who most likely wouldn’t have cared, but I didn’t want to risk it. One of the movies I remember seeing a lot on the Thriller Double Feature, or possibly even on rival network WKBD’s Creature Feature, was the first Creepshow movie.
Written by Stephen King and directed by George A. Romero, Creepshow was an anthology movie that contained five stories, each an homage to the horror comics produced by EC Comics in the 1950’s. During the comic book culture wars of post-World War II America, comics produced by EC like Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, and The Haunt of Fear were deemed unhealthy for American kids by the government, leading to self-regulation by the comics industry.
The self-imposed Comics Code Authority eventually led to the end of EC Comics, but by then, millions of Americans were already influenced by the lurid tales published by William Gaines. King was one of those influenced, and in 1982, he wrote Creepshow with the same style as the EC line. Romero, along with special effects artist Tom Savini, added a comic book look to the visual part of Creepshow.
Creepshow was scary. It had people rising from graves to avenge their deaths, a beast rampaging on a college campus, a swarm of cockroaches, and a truly creepy kid (played by King’s son, Joe Hill) who uses a voodoo doll on his dad (an uncredited Tom Atkins). I remember the blood, zombies, death, and being scared.
But Creepshow actually isn’t scary. It’s a pretty standard 1980’s horror movie with some hokey elements that don’t really frighten so much as make you laugh. One of the stories, “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill” is actually very funny with a pretty good performance from King himself as the doomed Verrill. The writing is predictable, but it is an homage to a 1950’s comic book line, so some predictability can be expected. What Creepshow does best is make a group of legitimate actors (Leslie Nielsen, Ted Danson, Hal Holbrook, and E.G. Marshall all make appearances) look goofy.
If most of us look back at the movies that scared us when we were younger, we’ll most likely find that they’re not really that scary. In fact, we might laugh at ourselves for even thinking that something like The Stuff was ever truly scary. But when you’re younger, the world is still full of mysteries. A yogurt-type substance that will turn you into a zombie while it drains your insides seems like it might be plausible to someone who a few years earlier found out the truth about Santa Claus.
As we get older, we realize the implausibility of most of the ideas we see in horror movies and it helps us cope with being scared, even if we get a night or two of restless sleep. It might even make certain movies unwatchable due to an inability to suspend reality enough to have some fun, but that’s really what shows like the Thriller Double Feature were all about: fun. The movies they aired were almost universally bad with dreadful plots, and even worse acting, but they were a lot of fun to watch even if it meant staying inside on a Saturday afternoon.
