Hosts with the Most
By T.J. Tranchell
Ah, distinctly I remember a late Saturday night just after I moved to Reno, Nevada. I was awake late (because that’s how I used to live) and found a wonderful surprise on a local TV channel. The movie was a classic of the low-budget era: The Crawling Hand (1963). Then the host appeared. Zomboo the Zombie Vampire. Drawn from Zombo, the horror host in The Munsters, Zomboo has his cast of characters: Mini Z, Miss T, and Bianca the Rack Girl. I was in my 20s and single, so yeah, I enjoyed the appearances of Bianca more than I should have, but the whole cast was just funny enough to make interrupting the movie worth it. Zomboo wasn’t my first horror host, but he was the first one that was “local” to where I was.
I grew up in Utah, and we did not have a late night horror host of our own. There was a Saturday morning cartoon host and that was close to the same thing. My childhood, however, was in the 1980s so Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, was everywhere. I didn’t need her show to know her gig because I had seen it already on PBS. At the time, Vincent Price hosted Mystery! on public television and the same station showed reruns of The Twilight Zone with Rod Serling doing his thing.
Getting a local host was something I learned to appreciate. Even after I moved out of Reno, I tried to follow Zomboo. Social media has helped, and now his shows end up on YouTube. I think this is true for many hosts. Would I have learned about Svengoolie (who has also gone national) without social media? Would I have learned about Spokane’s Igorro without social media? I might have because I am who I am. But discovering how many people grew up watching Bob Wilkins or Zacherle is different than just knowing who those hosts are.
We are well past the golden age of local horror hosts and even deeper into the collective experience. Now, people sit at home, open their apps, and post to each other about Joe Bob Briggs and his movie statistics. The Mutant Family, as they have dubbed themselves, shares in the delights of old favorites and rarities. Briggs has a distinct advantage over the local folks, though. Not only did he have a wide platform in the 1990s with MonsterVison, but he’s now on arguably the most popular horror streaming service, Shudder. That platform not only helps him reach more viewers but it also gets him out of only showing public domain films. One week he might show Alligator (1980) and Grizzly (1976), and another week show The Babadook from 2014 or 2016’s Train to Busan.
Meanwhile, Zomboo is showing 1962’s Nostradamus: The Genie of Darkness on a Roku streamer at 4 in the afternoon on Sundays. His local audience gets the show at 1 AM on Saturdays now. The more popular a host is the better time slots, opportunities, and movies one gets. It’s the same racket in all facets of entertainment. One of the reasons only a few hosts have become nationally known is because they’ve never been huge moneymakers for local stations. Remember, even Elvira and eventually MonsterVision got canceled, too.
But when has a horror fan or creator done anything to actually make money? To make some money, yeah, all the time. We are, in our unique ways, a bunch of sell-outs, but sell-outs who need to eat, not live in huge mansions. We don’t ask for much: heavy music, a cool shirt, some blood, and some boobs once in a while, and a good laugh. And, believe it or not, a few good friends.
I know, I know. We’re all a bunch of introverts who hate people as a general rule. The hosts were the first chances many horror fans had to create community, which is why the local hosts mattered — and still matter — so much. We could gather around the next morning, or the next weekday morning, and talk about the show and the jokes. The anticipation was part of the fun, as was the idea that once it aired it was gone. No reruns, no future syndication. Maybe, just maybe, somebody was smart enough to program their VCR and tape it, or quick enough to pop in a tape and hit record at the right time. Even then, we were taking our chances.
Then there’s tape trading, the precursor to just-posted things without permission on YouTube. Getting someone else’s tape was a mixed bag of quality and content. Sometimes, you could end up with a whole movie, commercials and all. Sometimes you ended up with someone’s parents’ homemade movie and that could be the scariest thing ever.
Live it up with the wide-reaching hosts we have now, but don’t forget to salute your local host (if you have one) and remember the hosts of horror past. 🩸
About
T.J. Tranchell was born on Halloween and grew up in Utah. He has published the novella Cry Down Dark and the collections Asleep in the Nightmare Room and The Private Lives of Nightmares with Blysster Press and Tell No Man, a novella with Last Days Books. In October 2020, The New York Times called Cry Down Dark the scariest book set in Utah. He holds a Master’s degree in Literature from Central Washington University and attended the Borderlands Press Writers Boot Camp in 2017. He currently lives in Washington State with his wife and son. Follow him at www.tjtranchell.net or on X @TJ_Tranchell.
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