A horror host is a person, typically in character, who presents horror movies or similar content to an audience. The horror host often dons a strange costume or makeup and can vary from spooky, straight-forward, or even downright comical. However, despite their often morbid appearance, the horror host actually serves more as a comforting friend rather than foreboding figure. It is they who are the ones to provide company in the midst of terrors, thus serving to lighten the scares rather than add to them.
While associated by large today with television personalities, the concept of a presenter of frightening tales is nothing new. Even folklore has its parallels to the modern horror host. For even before television, radio or any electronic medium, those of days gone would spin tales of terror over roaring campfires deep out somewhere in a lonely wilderness. In a practical sense such oral storytellers functioned similarly to horror hosts even if not in the modern context of the term. Not to be outdone, classic literature too habitually employs narrators who are themselves not part of the main story such as Mother Goose, Jiminy Cricket, Uncle Remus, etc.
Still, chief among the ranks of fictional storytellers is the one whose name has long become ubiquitous with stories of the extra-abnormal. In the eighteenth century, the first English editions of One Thousand and One Nights introduced a whole new world of readers to Scheherazade, who cunningly spun stories to the king Shahryar quite literally— to save her own neck.
In One Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade relays scores of tales of corpse-devouring ghouls, cannibalistic cyclops, merciless genies, cutthroats, murderers, hunchbacks, and scores of terrifying monsters. Today to simply call something "Scheherazadean" readily denotes it as being amazing, marvelous, strange and wonderful.
But horror hosting in a modern sense owes an interesting distinction. Horror hosts, as the title implies, are not the teller of the stories themselves rather presenters, commentators and observers of the tale. Interestingly, many of the quirks of latter horror hosts first started to materialize in the curious and highly entertaining "mid-nite spook shows."
Beginning in the thirties, spook shows were a popular and rather unique form of exhibition entertainment. While many of such began within the context of the seances and psychic readings of the spiritualist movement, many of the serious overtones were later abandoned. Consequently, late night spooks shows were played as much for laughs as they were for scares. Spook shows featured a blend of vaudevillian comedy acts with simple yet effective illusions of ghostly manifestations and levitating items. Spook shows would continued to prove popular and draw crowds well into the nineteen sixties.
However, the first honest-to-ghoulness horror hosts emerged more or less in tandem with spook shows within radio stations across the United States in the 1930s. Series such as The Whistler, Inner Sanctum Mysteries, The Mysterious Traveler, Lights Out, etc. introduced audiences to mysterious, frightful and often still humorous storytellers who introduced stories of the sensational and supernatural to throngs of listeners.
Later, as television rose to prominence in the 1950s, many such series were adapted into the new medium; however, it was not radio adaptations that would thrust horror hosting into the national spotlight. Still, even before the first wave of television horror hosts, it would be remiss to fail to mention one ahead of her time. Maila Nurmi known to thousands as the horror hostess “Vampira” debuted locally in Los Angeles becoming an instant hit. Vampira presented horror films to audiences on television for the first time anywhere. While her performance and show was praised, The Vampira Show, would be abruptly cancelled in April 1955 following a dispute between the network and Nurmi over character rights.
Yet such was not the end for horror hosting for two years after Vampira's cancellation, Universal Studios, known for such horror classics as Frankenstein and Dracula, began to lease its horror film library for syndication. The package of fifty plus films was entitled "Shock Theater" and sold to markets across the country. Following in Vampira's footsteps came an explosion of horror hosts from John Zacherle as Roland/Zacherley in Philadelphia/New York to William Robert "Chilly Billy" Cardille in Pittsburgh.
Horror hosting would only continue to grow in the decades to follow especially with the syndication of new horror packages such as "Son of Shock Theater" and "Creature Features." Likewise, comic books, such as those published by EC Comics, would join in on the fun with titles featuring comparable ghoulish characters only further cementing horror hosts as a particularly American art form.
Today, despite the decline of locally-sourced TV productions, horror hosts can still be found in nearly every state and abroad. Please check out our fang-tastic Horror Host Directory to sample the wealth of horror hosts the graveyard over!
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