At This Time Of The Night…

Maybe it’s the quiet and the rustling of the leaves outside the open windows of our treehouse living room.

Maybe it’s having spent some time checking out the blogs doing a countdown to Halloween.

But it”s just past midnight on a Saturday night and the hour is perfect for the glow eminating from the television screen to be from some old horror movie or sci-fi flick.

On such a night – and at such a time in the night – thirty-years or so ago, the channel would be turned to Sammy Terry. Sammy was a ghoul who hosted such movies on an independent television station from Indianapolis.

The movies were rarely great works of cinema, but Sammy was there to empathize, make banter with a rubber spider named George, and crack bad jokes during commercial breaks for Don’s Guns and a used car dealer who would admit that “Old Dave needs the cash.”

Now and then, though, there would be a movie that was genuinely eerie.

(of course, I was a kid, so I recall finding portions of movies like The Deathmaster - some hippie/vampire/biker flick from the early ’70s – to be creepy)

Sammy has been retired since the late ’80s and, though I now have twenty times the viewing options, surfing through those options yields nothing.

There’s no Japanese man-in-a-suit movie or giant, radioactive ants rampaging through the desert to be found.

Apparently it’s too much to ask that one of the stations available be airing an old classic in glorious black and white like a Boris Karloff movie from the ’30s or something starring Vincent Price from the ’60s.

I’d dig finding a ’70s drive-in flick like The Legend Of Boggy Creek or The Boy Who Cried Werewolf or, perhaps, something from Chuck Heston’s oeuvre from that period – The Omega Man, Soylent Green - but no such luck.

Syfy Channel is airing some movie about bird flu that meets that station’s usual standards of excellence.

(the maddening thing about the bad movies that Syfy airs is that they aren’t even entertainingly bad)

It’s three weeks before Halloween, but the latemnight landscape is littered with little more than infomercials, some reality shows, and reruns of Rosanne and The Nanny.

(all frightening in their own ways, but…)

Sure, there’s DVDs, Netflix, and a number of other options for a fright fix, but there’s something about stumbling upon an old horror movie on television, late at night, that, I suppose, harkens back to childhood.

Here are four songs that will have to substitute for a midnight feature…

The Judybats – Witches’ Night
from Down In The Shacks Where The Satellite Dishes Grow

The Judybats came together as students at the University of Tennessee and released a handful of albums in the late ’80s/early ’90s, but I don’t believe that I ever heard them on radio or even happened across a video on MTV.

I did get a couple of their albums as promos and hearing them again after so many years makes me curious to go back and relisten to them.

Witches’ Night, about a Halloween party, is engaging, jangly, folk-tinged alternative pop that certainly would have fit well on college radio in 1990.

Ozzy Osbourne – Bark At The Moon
from The Ozzman Cometh

At the risk of being accused of blasphemy – possibly by Paloma – I’ve never thought much of Black Sabbath. Sure, they might have been influential, but, aside from a handful of songs, their appeal has been lost on me.

And, even twenty-five years ago, I found Ozzy’s Prince of Darkness schtick to be laughable. Would the Prince of Darkness have a paunch?

Seriously?

But I do dig some of Ozzy’s catalog and Bark At The Moon is good fun.

Mazzy Star – Ghost Highway
from She Hangs Brightly

Mazzy Star rose from the ashes of the band Opal and consisted of the duo of singer Hope Sandoval and guitarist David Roback (who, in the ’80s, had been a member of paisley-tinged rockers The Rain Parade). She Hangs Brightly was the twosome’s debut effort, arriving in 1990.

With Sandoval’s aloof vocals and a sound that was atmospheric and dreamy, Mazzy Star’s artistic slant on psychedelic rock earned comparison to acts like The Velvet Underground and The Doors. The group would navigate a record label bankruptcy to notch a hit with the wispy Fade Into You three years later.

R.E.M. – I Walked With A Zombie
from Where The Pyramid Meets The Eye: A Tribute To Roky Erickson

It was Paloma who turned me on to the eccentric brilliance of Roky Erickson and The 13th Floor Elevators with their album Easter Everywhere.

That was four or five years after acts ranging from ZZ Top and T-Bone Burnett to The Butthole Surfers and Bongwater paid tribute to the legendary Austin cult musician, covering his songs on 1990′s Where The Pyramid Meets The Eye.

(The Judybats had actually made their debut on the compilation)

The Hills Have Eyes (And They’re Sensitive To Obscene Finger Gestures)

The other night, the cable offerings were rather uninspiring, but, as it was after dark, I stopped on the remake of The Hills Have Eyes.

The flick wasted little time getting to the carnage, opening with a group of scientists clad in protective gear being torn apart by some savage creature. It was gruesome but hardly shocking.

What has stuck in my head is a scene that came later, after the vacationing family had broken down taking a shortcut through the same remote stretch of desert.

It wasn’t the family dog getting gutted or the patriarch being beaten to a pulp then set aflame. No, it was a scene in which one daughter in the family gave the finger to her sister.

The defiant digit was blurred out.

Pondering the interesting choices in censorship aside, the movie made me miss the horror flicks on which I had grown up in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

I’m not referring to the movies of that time but rather the late-night television fare in a world without cable on our local independent station (usually the only one still on air after midnight).

These were mostly B-movies from the ‘50s, ‘60s, and early ‘70s and often in black and white. Sometimes they were surprisingly eerie, rising above their budgetary limitations, but, often, they were laughably shoddy or dated – bobble-headed alien invaders, puppet creatures and hippie vampires.

It was the latter which held the most entertainment value for me and several friends from the neighborhood when we’d hang out on Saturday nights in the early ‘80s. Not yet old enough for cars, girls, or guns, we’d be sprawled out on bean bag chairs in the dark basement of our friend Willie.

(as it was his basement, he had right of first refusal on the ancient couch)

Saturday night was the night for Nightmare Theater, hosted by the ghoul/zombie Sammy Terry (pictured above), who would add his commentary during commercial breaks or banter with a fake spider named George who “spoke” in squeaks.

For a couple years, ours was a ritual gathering most summer nights on Saturdays – Chris would be wired on Mountain Dew, Kurt would be obsessing over the dollar he’d loaned to Chris for the drink. Sometimes there would be a half dozen of us hanging out in that panel-walled womb.

We’d howl in amusement with every bad pun Sammy would deliver and yell, “George!” in unison the first time that rubber spider would descend into the scene.

By ’83, we had access to cars and had begun the pursuit of girls. There weren’t as many viewings of Sammy, but it was always fun to catch the show on occasion.

Years later, crashing out and watching Nightmare Theater was an incentive to make the trek home from college.

I hadn’t seen the show for twenty years until discovering a trove of clips here.

In 1982, the last year my friends and I regularly tuned into Nightmare Theater, I was still coming to the realization that I quite liked music – to an almost obsessive degree. It was still mostly Top 40, but I was venturing to some album rock, too. Some of the songs I remember from that spring…

Hall & Oates – Did It In A Minute
from Private Eyes

Hall & Oates were such a constant presence on radio and MTV in the ’80s, there are songs of theirs which I really wouldn’t miss if I never heard them again (I Can’t Go For That and Out Of Touch come to mind).

Then, there some of their lesser hits from that time – songs like How Does It Feel To Be Back, Wait For Me, Family Man - which are pleasant surprises when they pop up. The breezy Did It In A Minute is in the under appreciated category.

Joan Jett & The Blackhearts – Crimson And Clover
from I Love Rock N’ Roll

Joan Jett’s I Love Rock N’ Roll was a monster in early 1982 and I imagine she could have belched the alphabet and had a follow-up hit. Instead, she opted for a cover of Tommy James’ Crimson And Clover.

Of course, my schoolmates and I had no idea who Tommy James was. It was one of our “hip” teachers who played the original for us in homeroom one afternoon.

We much preferred Joan.

Van Halen – (Oh) Pretty Woman
from Diver Down

Diver Down might have been Van Halen’s fifth album, but as the first four were released when I had little interest in music, it was my first exposure to Eddie and Diamond Dave.

Their take on the Roy Orbison classic isn’t bad, but I wouldn’t even offer it up as the best cover song on Diver Down (and there are several). Instead, I’d go with their version of Dancing In The Street.

John Cougar – Hurts So Good
from American Fool

American Fool was the album that would make Johnny Hoosier (as my friend Bosco called him) a household name. Growing up in Indiana, Hurts So Good was on every radio station from the moment it was released and the rest of the country soon joined us.

I was fairly ambivalent about Hurts So Good at the time. I had no idea that its success would, by the time Johnny Hoosier had become John Mellencamp, literally change the course of my life in ways I could have never imagined as a kid in junior high.