Sometimes I feel sorry for kids today. Sure they've got phones the size of matchbooks, hyper-realistic video games and blankets with sleeves, but they're missing out on the fun of watching a good local TV horror host.
When I was a kid, a horror host named Sammy Terry was the star of Nightmare Theater on Channel 4 in Indianapolis. We lived 70 miles away from Indy and if I turned the TV antennae just so and all the atmospheric conditions were right, I could get a snowy image of Nightmare Theater and see Sammy every Friday night.
Each week, Sammy Terry would raise the lid of his coffin, hoist himself out and introduce that week's movie. He had a rubber spider on a string named George, who served as his sidekick and spoke in high-pitched gibberish that only Sammy could understand.
Sammy would interrupt the movie periodically for some truly awful puns and one of his soliloquies. He'd drone on and on in his drawn out "spooky" voice for what seemed like half an hour, talking about all manner of macabre topics. Due to the late hour I'd sometimes doze off during one of his interludes, and I'd wake up 20 minutes later and he'd still be talking!
Despite his penchant for rambling, I loved Sammy and his show and never missed it for years. Back in the pre-home video days, shows like Sammy's were the only place you could see old horror and sci-fi movies. If you wanted to see a particular movie, you just had to wait until it showed up on TV. There were no video stores and only 3 major networks. Sammy introduced me to Frankenstein and Godzilla and many others, and for that I am truly grateful to him. I wouldn't be a horror fan today if not for Nightmare Theater.
Even though I loved the films he aired, I rarely managed to see the entire movie. Most of the time I'd wake up on the couch at 3 a.m. with the TV blasting away a blank screen full of snow. It just came on too late for me to make it through all the way.
Sadly, most of Sammy's shows are lost forever. A few years ago I worked with a guy who interned at Channel 4 in the 1970s, and he said back then it was common practice to videotape a show, air it, and then tape the next week's show over the previous one. Apparently videotapes were prohibitively expensive back then, and in those pre-home video days, no one dreamed there'd ever be a market for old TV shows. It makes my head hurt just thinking about all the hours of Sammy's show (and dozens of other samples of TV history) that are gone forever.
By the way, I watched his show for many, many years before one day I finally got his name. Sometimes I can be a little slow. Sammy's retired now, but still occasionally appears at horror conventions around the Hoosier state.
I wish there were still horror hosts on TV, but in an age where you can own or dial up any movie you might ever want to see, there's probably not much point in it. Horror hosts have gone the way of buggy whips and powdered wigs.
Anyway, here's my version of Sammy Terry and his pal George the spider. I didn't notice it back when I was watching him on a snowy TV set, but in reality Sammy's yellow gloves appear to be everyday dishwashing gloves, with what look like "veins" drawn on with a marker (!). No idea why he's have veins on his gloves, but whatever.
Drawn in Photoshop on the graphic tablet.
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