Imagine, then, your local station's surprise when horror flicks proved immensely popular. Perhaps it was Cold War Paranoia, perhaps the local hosts exercised a mysterious power over their viewing minions. (Perhaps the next sound you hear will be...a theremin) Classic hosts ran the gamut from KABC-TV's Vampira, the original Lady of Horrors, and Elvira, the stacked Mistress of the Dark and presenter of Movie Macabre on KHJ-TV (both in Los Angeles), to Count Gore DeVol, the (literate!) vampire host on WDXR-TV in Paducah, Kentucky.

The local horror movie broadcast was quite lucrative for TV stations. The film packages were a cheap source of programming, the local host segments were no-budget productions--often to hysterical effect--and the monster chiller horror theatre shock show quickly proved itself a reliable vehicle for delivering many bloodshot eyeballs to local advertisers. Long after TV was a mature business, in Omaha, Nebraska the Saturday night Creature Feature broadcast with Dr. San Guinary (played by a KMTV staff director, the late John Jones) was still pulling an estimated 52% share of that market's TV audience at the height of its popularity in the early to mid-70s.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, the local horror host tradition lives on in the person of Doktor Goulfinger (no "H,"--"they're for the weak," he says). The Doktor keeps the scary flag flying on Berkeley cable access, in personal appearances and at his web site, The Hip Crypt of Doktor Goulfinger.

The Dok is also one of the nation's leading experts on local TV horror hosts. He maintains a huge memorabilia collection including props, costumes and airchecks--expertise that led him to a gig as an Associate Producer and research specialist on American Scary, a documentary overview of the horror host genre by filmmakers Sandy Clark and John Hudgens.

Dok Goulfinger was kind enough to write the rest of this piece for us answer a few questions on the history of local TV horror hosting earlier this month as he completed preparations for his busy season:

How did you get interested in horror films and horror hosts?

DG: I think kids have a natural attraction to monsters. It's a natural extension of fairy tales. I grew up in the era of the 'monster boom', the early to mid-60s, when horror and science fiction films had established themselves as broadcast staples. In the San Francisco Bay Area, it seemed every local station had one or more regularly scheduled horror movie programs. My earliest childhood memories include films like Bride of the Monster (the first horror film that gave me nightmares), Tarantula, Creature Walks Among Us and The Magic Sword.

The defining moment for me was one Halloween night when I was about 5 or 6 years old. I was trick or treating with my brothers when my bag started to tear - this was back in the days when a kid could literally gather a shopping bag of booty in the course of an evening. I was close to home and ran in to grab a new bag. My dad was laying on the couch in the dark watching Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, and I walked in just as the monsters were being revived. The whole image - the monsters on the screen, my dad on the couch - imprinted itself deeply onto my psyche. That movie defines Halloween for me, and ever since it first came out on video tape, I've watched it ever year and think of my father.