Photo: Dick Dyszel
For decades, late-night television has been a tastemaker and a mirror of American culture. What began as an afterthought for broadcasters, a patchwork of programming, evolved into national institutions that shaped comedy, pop culture, even politics.
Earlier this year, SNL50 offered a reminder of that long history, not just celebrating one show’s legacy, but pointing to a broader tradition of late-night comedy now under increased pressure in an era of streaming and fractured audiences (not to mention hostile presidents). From its scrappy, experimental roots to today’s hi-fi productions, late night has always adapted, even as it faces an uncertain future.
It is worth noting that the hosts running point on Saturday night when SNL first debuted in the mid-70s were not always the likes of Johnny Carson. They were campier and spookier, a vestige from a period of television that was decidedly more DIY, more local. (Or even underground… if you pardon the pun.)
In the 1950s, many local stations simply signed off at midnight or filled their schedules with live wrestling and stock car races. That changed in 1957, when Universal’s Screen Gems released its “Shock” package of classic horror films. To keep viewers engaged, and sell more ads, stations were encouraged to invent hosts who could banter between reels.
The formula caught fire. Maila Nurmi portrayed the iconic Vampira, slinking across KABC screens in Los Angeles. Zacherley conjured a friendly but spooky undertaker character with ghoulish makeup, cracking jokes in New York and Philadelphia, while the irreverent Ghoulardi (the father of filmmaker PT Anderson) turned Cleveland into a hip, late night carnival on TV-8. Meanwhile, Chilly Billy Cardille appeared as himself, offering wry commentary in Pittsburgh–his show was so popular it even preempted SNL during its first five seasons on WPXI.
These hosts mixed humor with horror, mocked the movies, and built grassroots followings, bringing old Universal horror films to new generations of viewers. Local, low budget, and improvisational, they gave viewers a sense of community (and conditioned them staying up late to watch television during the weekend, years before “Live from New York” became an ethos).
In Washington, D.C., that mantle fell to Count Gore De Vol, the cape-wearing alter ego of WDCA’s station announcer Dick Dyszel. By the early 70s, Dyszel was already moonlighting as Bozo the Clown and a sci-fi children’s show host called Captain 20 when the idea for his show Creature Feature came almost by accident. “They were going to buy a film package. Up came Night of Terror with M.T. Graves. This is two o’clock in the morning, we had some beer and pizza. I just blurted out, ‘That’s what we need: a Saturday night horror show with a host,’” Dyszel recalls. “The general manager turned around and said, ‘You’re hired.’”
With no real plan, he leaned on what he had: “They knew I had a cape. I knew how to put white makeup on for Bozo, and we just faked it after that. They bought a coffin, and we faked it. There was no plan.”
Launched in 1973, Creature Feature quickly became a Saturday night staple across the DMV. It consistently beat the Carson reruns that NBC was airing on Saturday nights at the time and was number one in the market. “We were doing strong, we had really good movies,” Dyszel says. “The first SNL comes on, we look at the ratings and we’ve got double, easy.” At one point in 1974, curious about his audience, Dyszel asked his program director for guidance. “He kicked back, put his cowboy boots up on the desk, took a deep drag on his cigarette, before saying, ‘Dick, your audience is half female and half stoned.’ I said, ‘Okay, I can run with that. I’ve got a bunch of guys that are stoned and a bunch of women out there just madly in love with me, that’s great. I can do that.’”
But the rise of network-backed SNL inevitably changed the landscape. “My first reaction was, ‘Oh sh*t.’ Literally. I said, ‘Now we have competition,’” Dyszel recalls. “However, for the first season, no one knew what SNL was and Creature Feature maintained a good regional reputation. We were doing strong, we had really good movies. Then people discovered how good [SNL] was, and the network promoted it, so we took a big dump. There was no question—now, we were number two in the market.”
Even so, Creature Feature proved resilient. After initially going off the air in 1978, it returned in 1984, riding the rise of videotape and the boom in similar horror hosts like Count Scary elsewhere. When the show finally left broadcast television, Dyszel stayed inventive. In 1998 he became the first horror host to bring his program online. “We were the first TV horror show to stream on the Internet,” he notes proudly, a move that reaffirmed his pioneering streak long before mainstream television embraced the web. Today, he’s still experimenting, recently launching an AI-driven Count Gore.
Count Gore’s enduring success also pointed to something else: the format itself had gone mainstream. On Halloween night 1987, Cassandra Peterson appeared on SNL in full Elvira regalia, joining the cold open and later delivering a tongue-in-cheek “true meaning of Halloween” commentary during “Weekend Update”. It was a national stage for a tradition that began in local studios with cardboard coffins and greasepaint.
The influence is unmistakable. Elvira became a household name. And memorably, SCTV’s Count Floyd spoofed the genre, perhaps taking a cue from Count Gore himself. As Dyszel himself puts it: “People’d come up to me and say, ‘[Count Floyd’s] copying you!’ I said, ‘Maybe? But so what! I’m flattered.’ As much as I’d like to think I was responsible in some way, the fact of the matter is there were a whole bunch of other vampire horror hosts.”
Today, the torch now burns through Svengoolie on MeTV, Joe Bob Briggs on Shudder, and a new wave of YouTube and Twitch hosts. (Elsewhere, the popular Chiller Theatre convention has built its legacy on its relationship with Zacherley as well as the horror hosting tradition he helped establish.)
For all the shifting tides of late night, Count Gore and his peers proved that a little imagination, and maybe a coffin, could make TV immortal.