Back in the late 1950s and early '60s, American TV had a lot of time to fill. In the years before syndication, when TV was still a black-and-white medium, local stations had few programming options. They didn't have big budgets to create original shows, yet they still had to put something original on the air to connect with regional viewers and attract them back each day. This was especially true in the after-school and late-night slots.
Among the content used by local stations back then to fill dead zones were studio-produced comedy shorts like The Three Stooges and The Abbott and Costello Show, and old horror B-movies purchased or leased from film studios. Growing up during these years, I recall a steady diet of creaky monster movies from the 1940s and early '50s on New York's TV stations. These included endless spinoffs of Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolfman, the Creature, Godzilla and other characters. The results were films such as Horror of Dracula and The Ghost of Frankenstein—as if the horror of a vampire isn't immediately self-evident and Frankenstein wasn't bad enough.
Post-war teens' fascination with monsters began in the early 1950s with Saturday matinees at the movies and a rash of pulp teen horror magazines. By the late 1950s, the fad became a TV craze that lasted into the mid-'60s. The craze extended to novelty songs such as The Monster Hop (1958), The Blob (1958), She's My Witch (1958), Monster Mash (1962) and Mr. Were-Wolf (1963). The same goes for national sitcoms such as The Munsters and The Addams Family.
But in the 1950s and early '60s, simply airing monster fare on TV wasn't enough to hook local kids. Stations began using scary kid-friendly hosts, starting with Vampira in Los Angeles in 1954. A long parade of hosts followed. But perhaps the best and most engaging was New York's Zacherley. Born in Philadelphia as John Zacherle, the actor was pals with Dick Clark and began his career on the city's radio and TV stations as Roland (pronounced ROW-lind).
Crowned the "cool ghoul," Zacherle moved to WABC in New York in 1958, where he added a "y" to his last name and hosted Shock Theater and Zacherley at Large. Zacherley portrayed an oddly lovable, tongue-in-cheek undertaker with a wicked sense of humor and a signature sinister laugh. He'd come on before the film and whenever there was a break in the film for an ad or just to fill out the two hours, mostly to continue a running Transylvanian monologue with creepy, scary creatures in his dungeon, which kids came to view as a clubhouse. I've often thought Mister Rogers was created to bring kids back to normal from the morass of monsterdom.
Like all crazes, monster mania petered out by the late 1960s. With horrible images of the Vietnam war, civil rights beatings and serial murderers like the Mansons, Frankenstein's ghost seemed silly by contrast to aging kids. And as teens became young adults, diversions such as monster movies were replaced by dating and the rise of rock and soul concerts. Glam, shock rock and metal, though, tapped into a deep-seated love for the darkness of childhood.
Naturally, many of the creepy TV-show hosts found themselves out of work. New children's TV standards banished these hosts, leaving them destined to roam the earth signing publicity photos and appearing at monster conventions. Their appearance was a gleeful reminder of a time when being frightened was a phase and monsters' terror faded away when TVs were switched off.
Zacherley died in 2016 at age 98.
If you didn't grow up in Philadelphia or New York during this period, here's what you missed. Happy Halloween!
Here's a fast bio...
Here's more on Zacherley...
Here's the Zacherley trailer for American Scary, a 2006 documentary on the nation's horror-show TV hosts...
Here's Zacherley on What's My Line?...
Here's Zacherley hosting Disc-O-Teen on WNJU in Newark, N.J., a few days before Halloween in 1967. His special guests were the Box Tops...
And here's Zacherley at age 94, sharing his secrets...