Horror

Saturday Morning Horrors

As a kid, one of my fondest memories of Saturday mornings was sugar saturated cereal and cartoons. Spiderman, Hercules, Scooby Doo and many others.  Oh hold on… put on the brakes. No…. I actually wasn’t a fan of those cartoons. One of my brothers was obsessed with Spiderman, Rocket Robinhood and Hercules. Not I! Generally, I couldn’t stand those types of cartoons. Those cartoons were unfortunately on first Saturday mornings, then came what was more of the ‘ordinary’ delights in our household. The Hilarious House of Frightenstein and re-runs of The Addams Family, The Munsters and The Twilight Zone. Oh what a delight to hear Rod Serling’s voice first thing in the morning.

Growing up we had three… THREE channels. CKNX, CTV, CBC and eventually a fourth TVO was added. Fortunately, one of them showed more than just the typical Saturday morning fare. I may have lost my mind otherwise. I’m sure one of the programmers was a fan of the darker style of Saturday morning entertainment and somehow convinced the station manager that Morticia Addams and Grimilda were a must on a late Saturday mornings.

Occasionally on an exceptionally clear day, we would be able to get in a few New York stations and when we did… OH BOY!  We were in for a freaky treat! How I would pray for a cloudless Saturday morning.

Recently nostalgia started creeping in and I did a search for some of the shows I loved and to my delight was able to find some YouTube channels that are still showing reruns of the creature style shows such as Son of Svengoolie, Creature Features (which had a House of Frightenstein type host) and others that I was madly obsessed with.

Along with the creepy kids cartoons, there would usually be at least one show that would play vintage horror movies. I was always excited to see what shenanigans the creeptacular hosts would be up to. I loved that they would also rerun shows from the 1950s. One of my all time favourite openings is still Vampira.

We also can’t forget Elvira Mistress of the Dark. Typically a late night show, one of the channels we watched on Saturday mornings still ran her Midnight Madness.

Skip forward to today and we have spooktacular hosts such as Ivanna Cadavar from Macabre Theatre taking over the reign as the new TV Queen of the Underworld.

But…. back to Svengoolie. When we were able to get some of the upper state New York channels, I would literally have to fight my brother for control of the remote. Since we couldn’t get these stations every week, when we did, I had to take the opportuntity to see one of the best things about Saturday morning.

If we were extra lucky we would get reruns of Ghoul A Go Go (http://www.ghoulagogo.com/)

or the Count Orlaf Show.

Lucky for us today we have the internets and YouTube.  I am fortunate that I can still binge on channels and YouTube shows that encompass the need for schlocky themed, low budget, local broadcast style productions. Here are a few of my other favourites.

Mystery Science Theatre 3000

Chiller Night Theatre (this clip showing on of my favourite all time bad horror movies The Manster.

Full Horror (This channel doesn’t have a host, but has an archive of some vintages, b-horror movies.  Though the list isn’t a long one, the movies selected are some of the best, worst b-horror movies.)

Let’s not forget Shock Theatre.

Not to be confused with the original Shock Theatre from the 1970’s/80’s.

http://www.mediaprof.org/shock/

Often I think of starting my own channel. One of my partners in crime and one of my longest friendships (October Young) is also a huge fan of bad horror movies and schlock TV.  Together we have started our own production called Queens of Schlock. We are currently writing horror shorts but have often talked about  starting our own YouTube show. When I spend time watching some of my favourite YouTube channels or when we have bad horror movie nights, the inspiration to create our own show grows.  Stay tuned, you never know, that could be happening soon.

Growing up was a creepy, wondrous time of freaky Saturday morning cartoons. It might be time to restart the tradition.

What are some of your favourite bad movies, horror themed and hosted TV shows?  My next blog post will be about some of my favourite awesomely bad b-horror movies!

I’m free! FREE!

Now I can officially start writing full-time! So glad jury duty selection is over. It was an interesting experience. Similar to the the first time I was called for jury selection, yet different in many ways. I also found it much more stressful. A combination of sitting for long periods in the court room(s) and not really being able to write or even read for that matter. I had grand plans of getting lots of writing done. That wasn’t going to happen.

The roster was jam-packed for our turn as potential jurors.  On Monday, it seemed as if we were called up as soon as court started and each time we returned to the lounge, called back up again. Tuesday we spent half the day in the courtroom waiting to see if we would be selected for jury duty.  Yesterday was the only day that we spent a long bit of time in the lounge and even then, it was hard to concentrate. Each time a new bailiff, registrar or the manager walked into the room, all eyes were on them. We all wondered if we were about to head to another courtroom. Between that and the loud bantering of the two gentleman behind me, I couldn’t concentrate (which I can do with ease in a noisy coffeeshop). At least I was entertained by their conversation, on their strategy to get out of jury duty, if called up for selection.

On Wednesday when the manager came in to release us from jury duty selection, he half joked, “See you all in three years.” Personally, I hope that I’m not back there in three, four or even five years. I’ve done jury selection FOUR times now. I think they can remove my name from the pool now. (yes, I could get called again — once you are in the pool they can call you once every three years for as long as they want)

I am in the process of figuring out vlogging on and all the ins and outs of YouTube, so stay tuned for that. I am going to also be blogging a lot more often. Minimally, weekly, but am hoping to blog every other day. AND I can now livestream on Instagram, so I will do live vlogging. I’m incredibly excited to have a killer camera to use for vlogging. Part of figuring out vlogging, will be the how-to’s of software. I currently have iMovie and am also going to check out other options.

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