Spooky, scary & ridiculous

Halloween might be spooky season, but I love humorous horror. Let's revisit some campy horror classics.

66 years ago, in 1958, humorous horror came creeping into my life. 

My first exposure to humor within horror was the 45 RPM recording on the Cameo Label “Dinner With Drac” by John ‘The Cool Ghoul’ Zacherle.

Musical beginnings

Don't be confused like I was! I thought “Dinner With Drac” was the flip side of the “Monster Mash.” The “Monster Mash” was recorded by Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett and The Crypt-Kickers in 1962. When I did my research, it all became much clearer.

Fragments of recollections fell together. The humor of ghouls and goblins became vivid in my brain. Memories floated back like ghosts of the past.

 My brother, David, and I would play “Dinner With Drac” over and over, along with another recording that Zacherle did entitled “Igor.” We sat at the bar that my dad made in the basement and played the records nonstop. We sang along and I remember dancing and making eerie gestures and weird faces to mimic the lyrics.

Our ghoulish hootenanny would suddenly be interrupted by the voice of our mother yelling down the stairs.

“Turn that horrible music off!”

We would look at each other and laugh. Then, I would try to defend our taste in music.

“Oh, Mom! This is really cool!”

Her reply was, “Turn it off! If I have to come down these steps…”

Followed by her usual ending, “I don't know what's wrong with you…”

But if our Father yelled down the steps, “Turn that crap off.” It was instant silence. We would answer with a very polite “okay.”  

Here is a taste of the dreadful and ridiculous that was served at Dracula’s house, from “Dinner with Drac” by John ‘The Cool Ghoul’ Zacherle:

A dinner was served for three

At Dracula’s house by the sea

The hors d’ oeuvres were fine

But I choked on my wine

When I learned that the main course was me!

From “Igor”:

There once was a girl named Irene

whose hair was a bright color green

when I asked how she dyed it she simply defined it

‘I just used the juice from my spleen.’

The verse that I remember the most from “Igor” is:

A werewolf once tore his own hide 

To find out what was inside

He ripped and he tore till his hands ran with gore

And before he found out he died!

“Dinner With Drac” was recorded in Philadelphia on the Cameo label. John Zacherle, of course, was the lead singer who poetically spoke more than sang.

The instrumentals are done by Dave Appell and The Apple Jacks. The guitar work is great but the wailing saxophone is terrifyingly outrageous.

I urge you to look up ‘The Cool Ghoul’ John Zacherle and listen to his songs. 

The House on Haunted Hill

In 1959, I went to see House on Haunted Hill with David, who is four years my senior.

 I'm guessing that it was the first horror movie I went to. I was 10-years-old at the time. My birthday is in August, so I was 11-years-old in the second half of the year. Since I was with my big brother, I don't believe I was that concerned of being scared. We didn’t talk about the scary parts of the movie much. I'm speculating that it was not that frightening of an experience for me, because my brother found it more humorous than fearful. 

House on Haunted Hill was written by Bob White and directed by William Castle, the king of low-budget horror films. Starring Vincent Price, Richard Long, Carol Ohmart, and Elijah Cook Jr., a character actor whose claim to fame came from The Maltese Falcon where he played the baby-faced gunman, Wilmer. In House on Haunted Hill, he played Watson Pritchard, the owner of the house.

The plot is about an eccentric millionaire, played by Vincent Price (who else?), and his wife who rent an allegedly haunted house and host a ghostly dinner party. They invited five guests. If any of the guests stay the night, the guest will receive $10,000. 

That was a lot of money in 1959.

House on Haunted Hill is very much a B movie. It has some creepy scenes, but not that scary. My awakening to horrified humor came from a scene when a fake-looking skeleton rises from a vat of acid and dances across the floor. At the same time, in the physical movie theater, a skeleton sails across the theater in front of the screen. 

Even to 10-year-old me, it appeared hokey and silly. I was startled by the element of surprise but not scared. It was not spine chilling with terror, nor was it side-splitting with laughter. Director William Castle called this gimmick “Emergo.”

My brother and I thought it was really funny. I read that some theaters stopped doing the skeleton gimmick because kids threw candy boxes and soda cups at the skeleton. Some brought slingshots to the theater and tried to hit the skeleton with marbles and whatnot as it sailed across the theater.

You might be able to watch the whole film on YouTube here:

The Tingler

Later in 1959, director William Castle and writer Bob White came out with another horror film, The Tingler. The story features Doctor Warren Chapman, also played by Vincent Price, who discovers that when people become scared and have a spine-chilling sensation they need to scream or they can die of fear. If you don’t scream, a parasite emerges from your spine which Doctor Chapman calls The Tingler. A mute woman that supposedly can't scream is scared to death and they surgically removed the Tingler from her spine, proving their hypothesis.

Again, my older brother David took me and my friend Mickey, a kid that lived across the street, to see The Tingler. It was playing at the Colonial Theater in Allentown, a big, elegant theater with a balcony. I made sure that we sat just below the balcony.

About halfway through the movie I tell my brother that we're going to the concession stand to get some candy. Mickey and I each got a box of Jujubes, those little multicolored candies that are somewhat hard, but when you suck on them and chew them they get gummy and pull out your cavity fillings.

We go up in the balcony. Looking down, we could see my brother sitting in his seat. We started to chuck the Jujubes at my brother. When the first one hits him he twinges and moves a little, but then after that he doesn't move. He acts like nothing's happening. This annoyed Mickey and I so we started to throw Jujubes faster and harder, and no reaction. The people sitting around him became annoyed. But not David.

William Castle loved to incorporate gimmicks within his films. The movie was filmed in black and white, but the scariest scene is when red blood comes out of the spigot in the bathtub and an arm covered in blood emerges from the tub pointing to the medicine cabinet. The door of the cabinet swings open and on the inside of the door is the death certificate of the mute woman. She is then frightened to death.

Everything is in black and white, but the blood is red. You may want to research how Castle did that effect. It is very interesting. 

The parasitic creature called the Tingler, when removed surgically from the spine of the woman, was a 2 1/2 to 3 feet long, prehistoric looking centipede. Or maybe it looked more like a hellgrammite. There is a scene in the movie were an audience is watching a silent movie. The Tingler gets loose and is crawling on the floor of a movie theater, where it starts to crawl up a woman's leg. Of course, she starts to scream and there's panic in the silent movie theater visible on the screen.

At the same time the movie went blank and to my recollection the theater seemed to become darker. You heard the voice of Vincent Price say, in his authoritative eerie way, “Scream, scream, scream for your life. The Tingler is loose in the theater.”

Percepto

This is the most outrageous gimmick that William Castle ever did. It was called the “Percepto.” He purchased military surplus airplane wing de-icers, which had a vibrating mechanism. He then attached them to the bottom side of certain seats throughout the theater. Now you have people jumping up screaming from vibrating seats and he also had people planted in the audience to scream. In some cases, he had an ambulance parked outside the theater and a nurse in the lobby suggesting that people may faint or get ill from the fright.

All this chaos of fright is going on and Mickey and I are still in the balcony, screaming our little butts off. Jujubes are flying out of the boxes because we're shaking so much. We finally ran out of the balcony and down to the seats next to my big brother where we found protection from our fears.

I urge you to look up William Castle and read about his interesting career. It may or may not surprise you that he also produced Rosemary's Baby. 

This Halloween you may want to celebrate with a bit of nostalgia, listen to a John ‘Cool Ghoul’ Zacherle recording, watch a William Castle flick, and eat candy from the past as you throw Jujubes at your grandchildren.

Happy Halloween… If you like what you read click on the heart.

Thank you and have fun!

Larry

P.S. Check out my new children's book Bookworms Magical Journey.

And don’t forget my other nostalgic fiction books, the novella Death of Big Butch and the short story collection, Coffee in the Morning.

I’ll be speaking to media/communications students at Northampton Community College this week and am booking storytelling/author visits for Bookworm’s Magical Journey now. This colorful, playful book— available in paperback and hardcover— was designed with a dyslexia-friendly typeface and breaks down the concepts of learning to read. Reply to this newsletter if you’d like more information.