I’m in my late-forties. Among the various other things that this statement of age can represent, it means I’m from the generation who was born into one of the biggest monster and paranormal mania explosions into the pop culture of the last four or five decades.
When one says the words “Hammer Horror” in most genre company, the talk frequently turns towards the classics. Dracula is a name almost instantly brought up along with Frankenstein and then the Mummy quickly following. Names like Cushing and Lee pepper every conversation, and men of a certain age- those ages being anything over the age of ten –will likely start discussing Caroline Munro in rather short order. Thank you ever so much Lamb’s Navy Rum. Ingrid Pitt will also frequently become the topic of intense discussion.
You’ll even occasionally get mentions of things like The Curse of the Werewolf, The Reptile, and The Plague of the Zombies. Maybe you’ll even get someone who brings up The Gorgon or even the Quatermass films. However, it seems that in large part the casual fan of Hammer’s horror offerings tends to leave a large chunk of Hammer films out…
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ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON NEEDLESS THINGS ON JUNE 15, 2017
The newest iteration of the Mummy has come to the big screen, and all signs point to it leaving the big screen in fairly short order. I don’t write that with any sense of joy. I’m a horror guy. I like horror, and I actually like the Mummy as an iconic horror monster. I’d love to see more of the attempts at modern horror using the classic monsters succeed. I’d love to see a shared universe where the Universal Studios classic monsters all walk the same Earth. Unfortunately, it sometimes seems that we either won’t be getting that or that we’ll get it and it won’t be worth the time to watch it.
It was a different age of television. Channels were far more often than not locally run, and most stations had their own smaller studio production facilities where actual programming was made for broadcast. This programming wasn’t just your six o’clock news either. Back in those days, you would get local morning shows, children’s game shows and programming, and special event presentations starring the local talent that was geared towards the tastes of the regional audiences. But the favorite amongst the local programming in many areas was whatever show featured a horror movie and a horror host. Back in 2009 C.W. Prather’s labor of love, Every Other Day is Halloween, looked at a slice of this bit of television history by focusing on Dick Dyszel, a man known throughout the DC area and beyond as Bozo the Clown, Captain 20, and, most importantly, Count Gore de Vol.
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Bill Mulliganhas been a guest on the show. Why not check out some of his (and the rest of his fellow filmmakers’) stuff? Christine Parker set up a YouTubechannel for some of their older stuff as well as to advertise their newer works. It’s Halloween. Check a few of them out here, then find the rest on their YouTube page and play ’em for part of your Halloween party viewing. Plus, hey, track ’em down at a convention and buy some of their stuff that’s not featured on their YouTube page.
Well, in one case, it’ll be the podcasting Needless Things that Richard got into that we’ll be highlighting here.
Richard does more with podcasts than just The Assignment: Horror Podcast, We’ve joked on the show about the fact that John, Richard, and (occasionally) Jerry do the Pro Wrestling Roundtable together, but he also has his own show, Nerdy Laser, over on the Earth Station One Network where he occasionally covers the scary as well as the nerdy. He’s also sought after as a guest on various podcasts in the ESO Network as well as outside the network.
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Okay, we don’t typically cover breaking news here on The Assignment: Horror Blog, but this is a special case. This is news of truly epic proportions that cannot be ignored here or anywhere else. Godzilla is now officially a universal star, or, rather, a group of stars.
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Maze Studios can be found at https://www.facebook.com/mazestudio1/
Our story so far…
Throughout the country, an almost uniquely American art form staked out a place for itself in television market after television market. For almost 50 years the American Horror Host entertained and inspired generations of geeks of all ages all across the land. By the time the 2000s were approaching, the horror host began to disappear- seemingly almost ready to become extinct -thanks to the quest for maximization of corporate profits. But there two new options out there- one having actually been there for some time, one a new and growing medium -which would help give the horror host a new lease on life.
The sad fact of television as the 2000s dawned was that throughout the majority of the United States the idea of local television was dead. The local VHF stations had gone down first, and then the…
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Before picking up where I left off in Part 1, looking at how horror hosting evolved to survive the television purge, I’m going to look at my hosts first. And, with at least one of them, that actually leads into talking about that evolution in a rather substantial way.
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Seemingly millions of years ago, back in the prehistoric days of television, say, the 1950s, the television landscape looked a wee bit different than it did today. For one thing, your viewing options were rather limited when it came to available channels. You had your networks, all three of them, and, if lucky, more than two local UHF channels. Even PBS didn’t come along until 1970.
That was, with regards to variety in television viewing, the downside. The upside was that your local stations, even the network affiliated ones, were far more independent and creative than they are these days. Programming found outside of the hours where they carried the network lineups showed where they had the ability to play around, to create programming that catered to the local or regional tastes, and made their own programming in their own production studios. Some of this might be simple, inexpensive to…
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