A vintage horror movie, a vaguely spooky host and lots of lame jokes – what’s not to love?
On my recent travels to the US, I got to experience a lot more of the cluttered joys of infinite American cable TV than I usually do, and one thing I particularly enjoyed was catching up with long-running horror movie host Svengoolie’s Saturday night movie of the week on MeTV.
Svengoolie’s schtick is a grand throwback to the pre-internet world, where you couldn’t just find movies like Scream, Blacula, Scream! or House of Frankenstein through a few clicks. On stations throughout America, horror hosts would showcase dusty old vintage movies with plenty of jokes, skits and commentary.
Svengoolie (aka Dave Koz) has been doing this since 1979, believe it or not, and syndicated throughout America for the last decade or so. His campy, corny host act leans into the cheese and groan-worthy puns. But it’s also great fun because it feels like a secret club of fandom run the way it should ideally be. There’s no toxicity here, just silly in-jokes, rubber chickens, and an unending adoration for things like wolf men, Roger Corman flicks and giant ant invasions.
There’s something kind of charmingly low-fi and comforting to me about a grown adult dressed up in Halloween gear introducing schlocky old movies. The horror host first emerged at the dawn of television in the ‘50s, and has shambled along semi-underground in some form or another to this day, with a new generation even taking the format to streaming.
I generally missed out on the peak horror hosts era from the 1960s to the 1980s, although I have hazy memories of old Universal Monster movies being shown on Saturday morning TV in the early ’80s with some goofy small-time local hosts kicking off the show.
I also honed my bad-movie love back in high school watching the USA Network’s “Up All Night” panorama of abominable flicks like Night Of The Lepus and Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes, sneeringly hosted by the late Gilbert Gottfried, and the classic riffing hosts of Mystery Science Theater 3000. These snark-fests all share a little DNA with the horror hosts idea.
The horror host was pioneered by the iconic wasp-waisted charms of the still-eerie Vampira, whose 1954 show didn’t even last a year but who paved the way for many others.
Vampira, alias Maila Nurmi, lived a complex life trying to recapture her brief stardom with things like an appearance in Ed Wood’s legendarily bad Plan Nine From Outer Space. Very little footage of her show survives now, but even brief clips show how this primordial queen of goths scared stiff the buttoned-up world of ’50s TV, and forged generations of successors:
There were many more – Zacherle, who chilled spirits on the East Coast for decades, or the famed Elvira, who successfully homaged/ripped off Vampira’s sexy bad girl act in a later, far more relaxed cultural era to become one of the most recognisable horror hosts of all time.
Svengoolie, who has been doing his own thing for 45 years and is easing in a cast of possible replacement ghouls, is pretty much the biggest name left on the scene, but the success of his show on MeTV gives hope that the horror host idea isn’t dead just yet.
In a world of TikToks and YouTubers, everyone is a host now if they want to be. Still, I’m pretty turned off by the influencer aesthetic of random strangers shouting and hustling at me from their phones while sitting in cars.
But give me a guy dressed up like a corpse or a shapely vampire woman in a bargain basement crypt setting, a few Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee flicks and a bucket of popcorn, crank up the groan-worthy jokes, and I’m happy to be scared silly in their company.
Nik Dirga 