Month: September 2017

How Ghoul Was My Valley (My Life as a Horror Fan, Part 4)

J.M. RobertsLeave a comment

It’s funny how some things you did as a kid seemed like inviolable, era-spanning traditions, when in reality you only did them for a few years. The Creature Feature is a good example. When I was little, it felt like a Halloween ritual I had observed for years and years, but in reality it was three at the very most.

The Creature Feature was an annual airing of Creature from the Black Lagoon – in 3D – hosted by the Cool Ghoul, Cincinnati’s erstwhile Saturday night horror host, on WXIX. Or at least my parents called it “the Creature Feature,” and I remember it being Creature from the Black Lagoon every time. The internet offers no record of the Cool Ghoul’s 1980s Halloween specials or what they were called, and the Creature Feature was also the name of a Sunday afternoon movie presentation on WXIX during the Ghoul’s heyday in the 70s.

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My Life as a Horror Fan (Part 3): Kiddo’s first drive-in double feature

J.M. RobertsLeave a comment

Maybe it was because my descent into near-panic a few months earlier watching Fantasia, or maybe they just wanted to introduce me to one of America’s finest institutions, but sometime during that same Summer of Cujo, when I was three years old, Mom and Dad decided to take me to a movie I could watch from the safety of our Skylark. It my was first visit to the drive-in movie theater.

Drive-ins were still plentiful around the Midwest in the early 1980s. One town away from where we lived, the Sky-View loomed over a back country crossroads. Not far off, the Colonial sat on a low strip of land between a two-lane state highway and the river. There were many others whose names I no longer recall. We went to the Holiday Auto Theatre, on a hilltop just west of town.

Read more “My Life as a Horror Fan (Part 3): Kiddo’s first drive-in double feature”