Dear Fans,
Last night I played a couple of the interview segments on the DVD set, Dark Shadows The Beginning: vol. 5. One of the interviews was with Leonard Wolf, who I last caught sight of back in the Seventies on a late night talk show with Peter Cushing and Forry Ackerman. Anyhow, Leonard Wolf comes in to try to explain why the DS pop cultural phenomenon hit so big in the late Sixties. He contrasts the Fifties, which he describes as a culturally and psychologically "desiccated" era, with the Sixties which exploded as the decade wore on with ever more violent and jarring arcs of revolutionary ferment on every level.
After playing the interview, I was thinking about the late 1950s as the period when the vogue for "Horror Hosts" became a phenomenon of its own. I was trying to recall when Vampira's show was running--I think it was quite early, possibly around 1955? From the little I know, it seems as if Zacherley's show became the first really big instance of this type of show.
Although the horror hosts and their "creature features" were a very different type of show from our beloved DS, it does seem to have paved the way for other types of series such as Boris Karloff's Thriller and the Addams Family. Having an afternoon supernatural series looks from this point of view like the next logical step, although of course it was a very radical step for the production team to take.
I like the interviews with the ABC publicity guy who keeps remarking how the network suits had no idea what DS was about, how it should be handled, or really just why it was so popular.
Just a few thoughts--those of you who have done more research on horror hosts might have something to add. Interestingly, I don't recall horror host shows in my childhood in Maryland until the early 1970s. In the Sixties, the airings of horror movies I used to watch were not hosted, although they had spooky music and imagery to introduce each week's offering.
G.
