Blog-o-ween 2022: The Witch's Tale

The past few entries of Blog-o-ween 2022 have focused on more recent old time radio thrills. Today, let's jump into the wayback machine and travel to a time when commercial radio was young. In 1931, WOR and the Mutual Radio Network in New York City began to broadcast a radio program that would become one of the most influential pop culture artifacts of the 20th century. You may never have heard the raspy cackle of Old Nancy, the Witch of Salem, or the gutteral yowls of her cat, Satan, but their impact is felt even today in comic books and television. Come...sit by the fire...and listen to...The Witch's Tale.

The Witch's Tale was created, written, and directed by Alonzo Deen Cole. Cole, like any good innovator, had to convince his bosses at WOR to allow him to try his hand at a supernatural drama show. Management was unsure if a spook show was the right thing to compete with other stations' musical programming at the same time slot. The Witch's Tale, of course, became a huge hit, especially with the kids in New York City, who loved imitating the bon mots of the show's host, Old Nancy.

Old Nancy (and her pussycat, Satan -- played by Cole himself, some say!) was one of the first "Horror Hosts" in popular cutlture. The horror host acted as an MC for the evening's entertainment, guiding the listener through the more grueling aspects of the grand guignol with a well-placed zinger and pun. Other radio shows followed suit, and the idea made the jump to television in the 1950s when the Shock! films package was made available in syndication. Soon, every TV station had its own Old Nancy -- Vampira, Zacherley, Svengoolie, Chilly Billy, and Ghoulardi, to name but a few.

Even the comic books got in on the act. Bill Gaines's seminal horror line for EC Comics -- Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, and The Haunt of Fear -- brought the horror host to the full-color page. More comic book horror hosts followed: Uncle Creepy, Cousin Eerie, and Squire Shade. Even today, actor David Dastmalchian uses a television horror host as the central character of his wonderful series Count Crowley: Reluctant Midnight Monster Hunter.

Old Nancy was originally played by stage actress Adelaide Fitz-Allen. When she died in 1935 at the age of 80, it left the show in the lurch.

No...not that Lurch...

Assistence came in the most unlikeliest of forms. One night, after a late night broadcast, 13-year-old radio actor Miriam Wolfe began doing her Old Nancy imitation for kicks right on the spot. Alonzo Deen Cole heard her and was so enchanted and horrified by her vocal abilities that he hired her to fill role!

Sadly, Cole, like so many others on the cutting edge of culture, did not see the value of his own work. He held on to the original acetate discs that all the shows were recorded on. (It was common at the time for smaller networks to do this so that the same programs could be syndicated across the country and the world.) He also was one of the first (if not the first) radio writer to copyright his stories, and he kept bound copies of 332 of his scripts. However, by 1961, Cole didn't think anyone actually cared about the show anymore, so he destroyed all of his recordings before moving across the country. Less than 10% of the recordings of The Witch's Tale survive.

So, let's stop and visit Old Nancy and Satan for a while. Maybe Satan will jump up in your lap and let you pet him while Old Nancy spins a tale of Aztecs and ouija boards, of reincarnation and possession..."The Knife of Sacrifice!"

It is 30 October. There is 1 day until Halloween.

What would a month-long celebration of Halloween be without a mention of those men and women who take it upon themselves to further the case for horror films to generations of TV (and now internet) viewers?

I am speaking, of course, of the TV horror host.

The TV horror host was born in the early 1950s, when Maila Nurmi first pulled on her skintight black dress and, as Vampira, screamed into the cameras of Los Angeles station KABC-TV.

Things didn’t really start to gain traction nationwide, however, until Screen Gems released the Shock! horror film collection to TV stations in 1957.

Shock! (and later Son of Shock!...and, later still, Creature Features) was a package of movies that clearly needed some adult supervision. So, what TV stations began to do was take a page from radio’s playbook. They created hosts to keep the audience company during the broadcasts. Similar to the hosts of such radio shows as The Witch’s Tale, Inner Sanctum, and Quiet, Please, the TV horror host wasn’t just a neutral, uninterested voice at the head and tail of each show. No, sir! The TV horror host was a part of the show, commenting on the movie during commercial breaks with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Sometimes, like Zacherley at New York’s WABC-TV, comments were made during the actual movie! Heck, most of the time, the movie was so lousy, it was only the host segments that kept your attention and kept you from switching over to studio wrestling or the off-the-air test pattern.

Every major and minor market in every city seemed to have their own horror host. Usually employees of the station itself, these men and women were, like poor old Larry Talbot, just ordinary weatherpersons or newscasters by day, but by night (one assumes when the moon was full and the wolfsbane bloomed) became creepy ghouls and ghoulies. Mundane TV studios were turned into castle dungeons and mad scientists’ laboratories.

[We interrupt this blog post for a Film Studies nerd interlude…

[It’s kinda fun to imagine the Jekyll & Hyde aspect of TV Horror Hosts in those early days. The TV station was seen as a wholesome, if stodgy, source of information and entertainment. It was the first place the community turned to when trouble reared its ugly head. Yet, at the same time, at night, when everyone had gone home for the day, these spaces mutated into breeding grounds of anarchy. And at the center of this midnight massacre of rules and regulations was a person who, only a few hours earlier, dressed neatly in a coat and tie or a conservative blouse and skirt, had soberly delivered the day’s news. Only now they were dressed up as a beatnik ghoul and chucking firecrackers at their cameraman. Incredible! There’s another blog post there somewhere…

[Back to our regularly scheduled program…]

In Pittsburgh, our horror host was none other than Bill “Chilly Billy” Cardille. Some of you may know him as the on-location news reporter in George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Chilly Billy (and other late-night horror hosts in other markets) was so popular in the 1970s that Saturday Night Live was pre-empted and shown after Chiller Theatre. Executives at WIIC-TV certainly knew who paid the bills in Pittsburgh, and it wasn’t John Belushi.

Sadly, by the time I was old enough to stay up and watch (and, more importantly, appreciate) shows like Chiller Theatre, Chilly Billy was taken off the air. Local TV stations, thanks in part to the Reagan Administration’s FCC, were no longer required to air their own programming. Instead, they opted for infomercials and syndicated programming to fill the late-night hours.

What was a burgeoning monster kid to do?

Thankfully, cable television in the early- to mid-1980s was still kind of a wild west show. There were plenty of channels that thought the late-night time was the right time to air the outré. It may surprise some readers that the USA Network was ground zero for weirdness. USA showed Kung Fu Theatre, Saturday Nightmares, The Ray Bradbury Theater, Night Flight, and, my personal favorite, Commander USA's Groovie Movies!

The Commander was a wise-cracking superhero, who, from his secret headquarters beneath a local shopping mall, brought viewers some of the greatest and crummiest movies ever made. And the Commander was always on the side of the movie. He may have joked about them, but he was always enthusiastic about his movies. And so was Lefty, the Commander's right-hand man.

Like, tonight’s movie. It's a special Halloween episode of Commander USA’s Groovie Movies replete with commercials and promos and all sorts of VHS goodness. The Alligator People (1959) has got a bit of everything: Beverly Garland, cheapjack hypnosis, alligator men wearing pants, and that scene-stealer extraordinaire, Lon Chaney, Jr.!

So enjoy the festivities and remember to keep your nose to the wind and your tail to yourself!