It is 28 October. There are 3 days until Halloween.

I watched a lot of TV in the 1980s. A lot.

Maybe too much?

Every night – especially late at night – there was some cool show on the USA Network (Up All Night!, Commander USA, Saturday Nightmares, Night Flight) or on HBO (The Hitchhiker; Tales from the Crypt; Philip Marlowe, Private Eye). Throw in The Young Ones on MTV, The Joe Franklin Show on WOR, and Letterman on NBC, and every hour brought some new, offbeat form of entertainment.

Sometimes, you didn’t have to wait until the top of the hour to see something weird. Every so often, whatever you were watching would end early. Usually, a show would end three or four minutes before the start of the next program, thus allowing the station to play a few commercials and promos. Once in a great while, however, those three or four minutes would be five minutes…or ten minutes…or fifteen minutes.

What was going on? you wondered. The TV Guide didn’t say anything about this. It simply said Program A ended at 10:00 p.m., and Program B picked up right after.

Into these gaps in programming, some channels – like USA and HBO – fit short films. Hardware Wars, the famous parody of Star Wars directed by Ernie Fosselius in 1978, was one such piece of filmic filler. Bambi Meets Godzilla (1969) by Marv Newland was another.

But, like everything else, I was drawn more to the short horror films that would get played late at night. Whenever an old favorite or a new classic would get airtime in the rotation, I felt like James Woods in Videodrome, as if I – and I alone – was being sent a secret message by some cathode ray cult.

Here’s a collection of amazing work that you may never have seen before. Two films in particular – Louis La Volpe’s The Dummy (1982) and Recorded Live (1975) by S. S. Wilson, who would later write the screenplay for Tremors – are ones that I vividly remember seeing and being very freaked out about.

Recorded Live (1975), dir. by S. S. Wilson

The Contraption (1977), dir. by James Dearden

Living Dolls (1980), dir. by Todd Coleman

A Minute of Mystery (1980), dir. by Joey Ahlbum

Arcade Attack (1982), dir. by Mike Wallington

This one is a bit of an outlier in that it is nearly 30-minutes long, but I can remember seeing just the animated portion of it once.

The Dummy (1982), dir. by Louis La Volpe

Night of the Living Bread (1990), dir. by Kevin S. O'Brien