Remembrances of autumnal seasons past in West-by-Northwest Texas used to have a great deal to do with vandalized outdoor plumbing and general-purpose mischief: The treat lay in the trickery for generations of Southwestern youngsters.
For this rambling territory, such seasonal customs were changed forever when a Fort Worth broadcasting executive named Bill Camfield brought Halloween indoors and kept it there.
This autumn marks the 66th anniversary of an intense pop-cultural phenomenon known as “Shock! Theater” — a nationwide sensation that struck a particularly resonant chord in North Texas. For Camfield personalized the TV-syndicated “Shock!” program to such an extent as to brand it with a character unlike any other “Shock!” presentations in New York or Los Angeles or New Orleans or … you get the picture.
Longtime residents with longtime memories will recall the television breakthrough of “Shock! Theater” under a localized name: “Nightmare” premiered during September of 1957 over the scrappy and innovative Channel 11.
“Shock!” was no rigidly scheduled program, but rather an adjustable package of movie chillers and whodunits from the Depression-into-WWII years. These Universal Pictures productions, recycled to television by Columbia Pictures’ Screen Gems syndicate, included such recognized classics as James Whale’s “Frankenstein” (1931), with Boris Karloff; Tod Browning’s “Dracula” (1931), starring Bela Lugosi; and George Waggner’s “The Wolf Man” (1941), with Lon Chaney, Jr. One or another local TV station typically would assign a staff announcer to pose as a creepy/comical master of ceremonies; most prominent of these so-called horror hosts was John “the Cool Ghoul” Zacherle in Philadelphia and New York. The emcee, in turn, would introduce the various Frankensteins and Draculas and so forth — and then intrude at intervals to present skits and gags.
At Channel 11 in Fort Worth, chief writer and announcer Bill Camfield took a different approach. He portrayed a severe character named Gorgon, who took the movies seriously enough to reflect their no-joking nature in his introductions and interludes.
“Classic horror states a moral lesson, y’know,” Camfield told me during a reminiscent conversation in 1984. “Usually has to do with menaces loosed upon humanity by some arrogant genius who ‘tampers where forbidden,’ as the saying goes: Take Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, for example, who took a cue from Prometheus and literally stole the very heaven’s own fire in order to create taboo life — and paid for his arrogance. Same with H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man: Don’t mess with nature, lest nature mess with you.
“And Bram Stoker’s Dracula?” Camfield asked. “As righteous a bloodthirsty shocker as ever you’ll find: Pure predatory erotic menace, but entirely susceptible to the holy icons. Get a vampire on the run with a good silver crucifix — and he’s a scram-pire.” Had I mentioned that Camfield enjoyed seasoning his essentially serious nature with old-fashioned cornball humor?
“I had majored in English literature at Texas Christian University,” Camfield (1929-1991) continued on that occasion, “and I had developed a keen appreciation for the Gothic origins of The Wolf Man and Dracula and Frankenstein and suchlike.
“Most of the other horror-show hosts around the country were playing it tongue-in-cheek with the ‘Shock! Theater’ package — but I wanted to play my version for all the menacing mood I could muster,” added Camfield, relishing the alliterative wordplay.
“I was a grammar-schooler in Amarillo, Texas, when ‘Shock! Theater’ arrived in 1957. My classmates and I sensed a connection between these ferocious movies and the emerging phenomenon of rock ’n’ roll music, if only because our parents and schoolteachers seemed distrustful of both influences. (The kinship was cinched when John Zacherle released a recording called “Dinner with Drac,” competing for airplay with Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis.)
“Our local host, an Amarillo Little Theater hambone named Fred Salmon, called himself Mr. Shock and played his Friday-night ‘Shock!’ segments for grotesque slapstick effect. I found the character a distraction but kept watching, anyhow. Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein Monster, Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula, and Claude Rains’ tormented Invisible Man were too good to miss. To the target audience that my schoolboy contingent represented, the movies seemed as new as such fresh-from-Hollywood, big-screen sensations as ‘I Was a Teenage Werewolf’ (1957) and the ostensibly futuristic ‘Frankenstein 1970’ (1958).”
A movie-business colleague in West Virginia, Robert Tinnell, explains the appeal: “While the fallout from the release of the ‘Shock! Theater’ package cannot compare to, say, the Beatles, in scope, it absolutely can in terms of intensity. The reverberations of the showering of kids with those films is still being felt today — in everything from breakfast cereals such as Frankenberry and Count Chocula to big-budget films like ‘The Wolfman’ [the 2010 remake] and [2004s] ‘Van Helsing.’” (The influence is particularly evident in the web’s heavy-traffic Classic Horror Film Board.)
“What’s more,” adds Tinnell, “I think it’s undeniable that a significant portion of the fan community was born of the ‘Shock!’ experience … I still feel very connected to the phenomenon. I’m just grateful I grew up with a horror host like Chilly Billy Cardille out of Pittsburgh — he took the job of warping my impressionable mind seriously.”
Such warpage in my experience included the Shock!-ing spectacle of watching my hometown’s horror-picture host nearly electrocute himself on live television with an unshielded microphone cable, while staging a remote broadcast alongside the duck pond of a cemetery. Hence the name “Shock! Theater,” one supposes.
The impact of such programs was as widespread as the then-48 United States. Such “Shock!” hosts as Los Angeles’ Jeepers Creepers and New Orleans’ Morgus the Magnificent followed John Zacherle’s example of taking a stab at the hit-record market. The Jeepers recordings feature the work of a young Frank Zappa; a Morgus record showcases New Orleans rockers Frankie “Sea Cruise” Ford and Malcolm “Dr. John” Rebennack.
“I had thought about maybe making a Gorgon record back then,” Bill Camfield recalled, “what with our fine local community of rock ’n’ roll talent, like Delbert McClinton and his band, available to back me up. Never quite got around to that. TV was plenty — and I had some other specialty-show characters that kept me busy, as well.”
A former production staffer at KTVT/Channel 11, Darrell Beck of Portland, Oregon, found one 1960s taping of a “Nightmare” segment especially memorable:
“We had decided to [shoot] behind the KTVT studios, just off the West Freeway in Fort Worth. We had set up a cemetery on the side of the berm, using cardboard tombstones and a cardboard casket for this evening’s taping.
“We were to have Gorgon [Camfield] come over the lip of the berm, drag the coffin partway down the hill, stop amid the tombstones, showcase the movie, continue his walk while giving the trademark, echo-enhanced Gorgon laugh, while we faded to black. We had several pots of hot water hidden, and blocks of dry ice generated a respectable ground fog.
“We had about 30 to 45 minutes,” adds Beck. “Down to our last attempt, Bill Camfield came over the hill, silhouetted nicely, dragging the coffin. He stopped partway down the hill, said his setup spiel for the movie, began a cackle that would build into the Gorgon laugh as the audio man turned up the echo pot. As the laugh built, Bill began to walk down the hill — and tripped. Then Gorgon, the coffin, a few tombstones, and pots of water, all caught up in the wake, all came tumbling down the hill. The mike was still on, echo effect still in place, as laughter turned to curses and groans.
“By the time we helped Camfield and cleaned up the mess, it was too late to try taping again. We watched the outtake again and again. It was as funny watching it the 20th time as it was the first. I think we taped a tamer version the next day.”
Camfield’s Gorgon held forth with the “Nightmare”/“Shock! Theater” duties into the 1960s, then staged revival appearances during the 1970s. Those “other specialty-show characters” he mentioned included “Slam Bang Theater’s” signature personality, Icky Twerp, who helped to spearhead a revival of interest in “The Three Stooges” during the 1950s and ’60s. Lured out of retirement by the newfound popularity of their earlier films, surviving Stooges Moe Howard and Larry Fine thanked Camfield and other TV kid-show hosts by casting them in a valedictory movie called “The Outlaws Is Coming!” (1965).
Various “Slam Bang” revivals during the 1980s found Camfield — in civilian life, a serious writer and levelheaded, suit-and-tie businessman — as generous as ever with the unbridled silliness.
Camfield could be just as generous with the low-key, ominous presence, although he preferred to retire Gorgon rather than venture beyond Old Hollywood’s classics.
“Without the ‘Frankenstein’s,’ the ‘Dracula’s,’ the ‘Mummy’s’ pictures, etc.,” as Camfield told Elena M. Watson, author of a 1991 book called Television Horror Movie Hosts, “you would have a mishmash of cheap science fiction, splatter pictures, and some mysteries.”
During his last years, Camfield became a newspaper columnist and cable-television developer, and a reliable source for my own efforts to write persuasively about the business end of the broadcasting industry. No strictly-business luncheon conversation with Camfield was complete without his occasional split-second lapse into character as Icky Twerp or the hollow-voiced Gorgon — to the amused delight and/or befuddlement of other diners seated nearby.
