Resurrected from Waaay back in 2003, here is my chat with horror host A Ghastlee Ghoul!
LR: What prompted you to begin broadcasting as a TV horror host?
AGG: “I had been a horror host fan from age eight when I saw Dr. Creep’s first episode of Shock Theatre. Before that I wanted to grow up to be Soupy Sales, but the dark allure of this guy who was similar to a cartoon show host, except that he showed these COOL scary movies, wove it’s way into my psyche. From then on I was drawing and writing about monsters, and even built my first haunted house at age eleven ( Scared the Bejeebus outta some folks too!). By the mid-eighties I was running haunted houses for the local Jaycees, and writing short horror stories. I had been toying with the idea of this character A. Ghastlee Ghoul, but didn’t know how to go about producing it or pitching it to a station.
Long, long story short– I had been collaborating on some stories with my friend Scott Huffman, who took a yen to do standup comedy. I wrote some material for him which he wouldn’t use, so I went and did it myself ( He was right, the jokes were awful!). Through doing standup I met a bunch of comics who wanted to do a cable-access sketch-comedy show. One character I brought to the table for our group effort, The Underground Sideshow, was the festering idea of Ghastlee. The Ghastlee Movie Show became a sketch. Life working as it does, everyone else involved eventually drifted away from the Underground Sideshow, the GMS consumed that which had spawned it, and I became what I was originally a parody of– much to my delight! We will have been doing this silly, silly thing for 15 years on Halloween 2003. Whew!!! And there is no end in sight.”
LR: Which other host/s did you see as a role model?
AGG: “The ‘Unholy Three’ I call my illegitimate stepdaddys — in that they all helped inspire my bizarre behavior– are Dr. Creep ( Barry Hobart), Baron von Wolfstein ( Timothy Herron), and The Cool Ghoul from Cincinnati ( Dick von Hoen). These are the guys I grew up watching and learning from. They are three distinctly different types of hosts, and we were very lucky to be able to pick them all up here in Dayton back in the 70’s. It’s hard to say exactly what qualities I picked up from each one, but I would credit (Or blame!) Creeper for my bent toward the double-entendre’; The Baron and his producer Michael White for the pun-fun and my leanings toward the psychedelic in post-production; and The Cool Ghoul for my more manic tendencies.
Without outlining the exact ‘bloodlines’, which could be a novel, the horror host roots run deep here in Ohio. They trace back to Cleveland’s Ghoulardi, and beyond our State-lines to Zacherley, Morgus, and to the castle drawbridge of the Universal Monsters themselves. Before that were the novels, word-of-mouth tales, and legends that have kept us shivering in the dark since we first crawled up from the slime-pits. Where it started and where it will end is anybody’s guess, but I’m inspired every day by the labors of love my compatriots are turning out. It’s almost a perpetual-motion machine!”.
LR: What is your most abiding memory of your time as a host? (on or off camera)
AGG: “Oh, definitely the relationships I’ve formed with other hosts. Many of us work together now, contributing segments for one another’s shows, and running one another’s shows in our individual areas. When we all get together at conventions etc. it’s like meeting up with long-lost family. We are such a diverse group, but have all found ourselves heeding the hosting call.”
LR: What do you get from being a horror host?
AGG: “Not rich, that’s for sure. It’s like any other form of entertainment, you do it partly as a creative outlet and partly for the attention. It really just comes down to it being a lot of fun acting a-fool, and when you find out that people are actually watching it that is a real kick. It’s a sort of egotistical exhibitionism.
A couple of generations have grown up on the show now, and it’s always a kick to run into someone in a business suit who waits for everyone else to leave and then says,’ Man, I’ve been watching you since I was a KID!’. I did one show that was JUST for me, where I stared into the camera for a half-hour without saying a word. The reactions were hysterical. They ranged from ‘I couldn’t seem to switch the channel’, to, ‘I think he was trying to hypnotize me’, to even, ‘ I think he’s the DEVIL!’.
I still laugh about that. Is there anything so much fun as a good mind-screwing?”
LR: What are your interests outside of horror?
AGG: “I’m a musician/ songwriter, writer, and sometimes cartoonist– though horror manages to work it’s way into those pastimes too. I also recently became a Grandpa!”
LR: If you were left on a desert Island, what 5 films would you take with you? Why?
AGG: “Oh man! I didn’t know you were going to make me THINK! If I was on a desert island would I even have electricity to watch films? I’d probably be scrambling around trying to find food and shelter– and trying to get in Maryanne’s shorts!
Ok, ok. Let’s see here…
1) Creepshow. Stephen King, George Romero, Tom Savini– and it’s five movies in one.
2) Clerks. So many great one-liners in there! I can watch it over and over and laugh myself silly each and every time.
3) The Ghastlee cut of the 1963 cult-classic, The Manster. Have to keep my big ol’ ego fed!
4) Terror in the Aisles. A retrospective of some of the greatest horror films of all time crammed into one film. If you can’t have 100 horror films with you, then this would be the next best thing.
5) Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Hey, every once in a while you just need to be manipulated.
Not all necessarily my favorite films, but good ‘emergency rations’!”
LR: What impact do you feel that the internet/digital broadcasting will have on hosting?
AGG: “ I love that question! The very fact that we are doing this interview is a glowing testimonial to the power of the internet to bring like-minded folk together. A very few years ago it would have been pretty unlikely that this conversation would have ever taken place, much less read by anyone else. The ‘net gets such a bad rap over porn and music download sites, but beyond that there are amazing exchanges of information going on out there. The world really is right at our fingertips more than at any other time in history, and everyone from horror hosts to pot-holder enthusiasts to people who actually doing something serious with their lives are out there “networking”.
I was introduced to, and/or hooked on, the ‘net just a little over three years ago. Before that Dr. Creep and I could have been the last horror hosts on Earth so far as we could tell from our insular little world here in Dayton, Ohio. Then a friend offered to build a website for the show, and the reality that “We are not alone” slapped us upside the head. I discovered Count Gore DeVol’s weekly webshow, Creature Feature at www.countgore.com, and from there his Horror Hosts Mailing List, where many other hosts, fans, and hosts-to-be were also just discovering each other’s existence.
Friendships began to form, and before long we were meeting in person/persona at conventions, live movie shows that some of us were doing in our own areas, and even at Edgar Allen Poe’s final resting place. We began to work on group projects like The Spooky Movie Thanksgiving Leftover Special, which was produced by CW Prather from Northern Virginia, and The Attack of the B-Movie Horror Hosts, produced by The Nightshadow, who is from Los Angeles. The networking was in motion, and we began sending shows off to one another to run in our respective areas.
So was born The Horror Host Underground! www.horrorhosts.com . The HHU works on two levels; one being the website, which is a reference guide to currently active hosts. After only being up for a week the site attracted the attention of the BBC’s Sci-Fright hostess “Nina”– or at least her promotional folks– who asked, “Hey can we get in on this, or is it just for you yanks?” (Or words to that effect!) Suddenly the HHU was international! It all just came together that naturally and easily, thanks to the technological miracle of the ‘net.
The second aspect is the HHU Network. The idea here was not only to present a unified front and give us a common flag to fly over the shows we were each sending out across the Country, but to also offer a package of hosted programs to underprivileged areas that are starving for our variety of entertainment. At no cost, we’ll send shows to anyone who wants to sponsor them on their local cable-access channel. Right now The Ghastlee Movie Show is being seen in at least 10 markets other than our own, and I recently gained the distinct honor of being the first horror host EVER in Maine, as the first to play as part of the HHU block there.
Even better than the shameless self-promotion though, is the honor of being able to present folks like Halloween Jack, Dr. Sarcofiguy, Doctor Gangrene, The Bone Jangler, Professor Griffin, The Nightshadow, Baron Mondo von Doren and El Sapo De Tempesto, Remo D., I. Zombi, Doctor Zombie, Ghoul A Go Go, Mr. Lobo and others to our audience here.
A lot has happened, and is happening, in the hosting world that is directly traceable to the free flow of information and the ability to meet kindred spirits out there in cyberspace. There are folks out there hosting right now who were inspired to get into it through Count Gore’s Mailing List. I’m actually sitting here right now with my long-lost brother and illegitimate-stepdaddy, Baron von Wolfstein, thanks 100% to the ‘net and Count Gore. We probably never would have met without them.
Count Gore has not only brought many of us together through what he calls “the infernal machine”, but is also showing us the wave of the future with his web-broadcasts. While the rest of us are still trading tapes like primitives, Gore is sending his show out to the whole world every single week! He gets fan mail from all over the globe! This is very exciting stuff, and I really do believe is the future not only of horror hosts, but of television.
As in the Golden Age of tv, homegrown productions are exploring the new frontier. HDTV and cable modems are slowly bringing the two media together into one, and in the very near future your tv and your computer will be one. The boys at Brains On Film www.brainsonfilm.com made the leap from access to the internet a while back, and they are reaching far more viewers than a local broadcast– or even a tape-trading network– could ever hope to bring in. Orwellian nightmare or the ultimate empowerment of the people, which way it ultimately goes still remains in our hands to determine. So far, the digi-age has been a positive BOON to horror hosts.”
LR: What message would you give to any wanna be horror hosts?
AGG: “Don’t get started on the greasepaint, kids. Sure, it’s fun at first, but before you know it you’re hooked and there is no going back. All of a sudden it’s no longer just something you do in the evenings or on the weekends to relax, but something you HAVE to do! Then you move on to pancake makeup and glitter– the hard stuff– and it all starts with that first tube of clown-white.
Keep it clean kids; going cold-turkey on cold-cream is not pretty…”.
LR: Talk us through a typical shoot for your show.
AGG: “We usually tape on Saturday mornings. After years of packing the set and props up and dragging it all across town to the studio, I finally moved just set it all up at home and we tape here, which has been really convenient. So I get up at around 7 or 8am, slam down a bunch of coffee and a breakfast beer or two, then start going through notes and congealing them into some kind of order. More jokes will usually come to me as I’m organizing everything, so I add ‘em in and come up with a basic beginning, middle and end for each segment.
We work very spontaneously, so there isn’t a whole lot of word-for-word scripting, just an outline to keep us on track. Sometimes I like to keep back a line or two from the rest of the cast just to get a genuine, unrehearsed reaction out of them on camera. It has been observed before that the show has become a sort of running in-joke inwhich my sidekick, Jeff McClellan: American, and I just try to make each other laugh. Sadly true; we are one another’s best audience!
By about 10am the ever-growing cast begins to roll in. For the first 10 years I did the show without any regular players. A lot of folks made appearances and wrote jokes for the show, but would inevitably bow out when they started to get recognized on the street! Over the past five years though, I’ve somehow managed to attract a hearty band of helpers who do as much, if not more, behind the scenes as they do on camera.
So Jeff, Louu the Xxxmas Devil, the beautiful Suspira, and Grimsburger our “doorman” metaphorically and sometimes literally kick me in the ass to motivate me to grudgingly glop the makeup on. By about Noon I’m suited up and have begun passing around what we call our “internal makeup”– otherwise known as the vodka bottle– and we head to the set.
From there we just turn on the cameras, fire up the fog machine, and improv around the outline I’ve scratched out. We leave the camera rolling between takes most of the time, because that is when some of the funniest stuff happens. A lot of times we’ll go in to shoot one show and end up with enough extemporaneous material for another one or two. Sometimes we shoot for an hour, then other times the entire day passes before we know it. Two of my “illegitimate step-daddies”– the legends Dr. Creep and Baron von Wolfstein– have been joining us a lot lately, along with Dr. Freak , “The World’s Youngest Horror Host”. When we get together hours pass like seconds. Great chunks of our lives are pissed away having the times of our lives! As the old beer commercial said, “It just doesn’t get any better…”.
A big part of the show is done in the post-production. I love to edit, and will spend many more hours in the week or two following a shoot piecing segments together, doing audio/video drop-in’s, and just generally playing. Sometimes it seems like work, but when it’s done and I see it on the air, it’s all the motivation I need to do it all again!”
LR: Many thanks, Ghastlee. That sure was an informative, enlightening interview. Keep up the good work. You can visist A.Ghastlee Ghoul on the web at: Ghastlee.com
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