John Stanley Transcript

November 2, 2007

Kent Gustavson: Welcome back to Sound Authors Radio. This is Dr. Kent chatting with you, and on the line I have John Stanley. Are you there, John?

John Stanley: I’m sure here, Doc. Go right ahead.

Kent: And your newest book is called “I Was a Television Horror Host”. Is that right?

John: That’s absolutely correct.

Kent: When did that come out?

John: It’s only been out for a couple of months now. I was a horror host in the San Francisco Bay area for eight years. The program actually ran for a total of 14 years, and it’s still one of the most popularly remembered shows in the entire history of Bay area television. I have to give credit to my predecessor. His name was Bob Wilkins.

Unlike other horror hosts who always dressed up in costumes or played ghoulish kind of characters, Bob was a one‑time advertising executive who wore suits and ties. That’s how he presented himself on television talking about these old horror films and often reading from a copy of TV Guide so watchers would have a choice to turn to another channel. He approached it with a totally tongue in cheek attitude and he was actually the leading program in the ratings. He beat out NBC’s Saturday Night at the Movies back in the 1970’s.

Kent: How did you look on TV?

John: I looked pretty much the way he did, but I didn’t have as good a wardrobe of suits as he had. I didn’t wear the Gucci shoes. I went more for a collegiate look with a lot of sweaters and slacks and so on. My main emphasis was not only talking about the film I was going to show, and I always was knowledgeable about the background of most of these films. I wanted to present the very best guests that I could find, people like Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner, Robert Block, Lucille Ball, people who came from the top echelons of showbiz.

I was able to get them on the show primarily because I had also been a newspaper man at the San Francisco Chronicle, so I had good contacts to blend together my guests and the spirit of keeping these old horror films alive, talking about them and providing background about them.

Kent: Can you give us a few salacious details about the stars that you chatted with?

John: I tell you sometimes they have very weird characteristics, which I guess is apropos, since they make a lot of weird movies and sci‑fi movies. But Christopher Lee, for example, is a very snobbish individual having been brought up in British royalty. And he walked in and looked at my set, which was a dungeon kind of set, something you might walk into in a haunted house movie. And he turned to my producer and said, “Well this really isn’t the kind of thing I want to be associated with.”

He was literally walking out the door when up on a TV monitor ‑ because I was doing a segment at that time ‑ was Ray Bradbury, the great science fiction/fantasy author. And I was interviewing Ray on film about the sense of wonder and how this is something we’re all born with.

He describes it as a sleeping child and then as we discover all the wonderful things in life, the sleeping child becomes awake. It becomes our sense of wonder and our sense of wonder is what leads us through life. And Christopher Lee was so inspired by Ray Bradbury that he turned to my producer and said, “Well if it’s good enough for Ray Bradbury, I guess it’s good enough for me.” And he didn’t walk out the door, he stayed and we did our interview.

Kent: Ray Bradbury is a great hero of mine. I grew up reading his books. How was that, interviewing him?

John: I want to tell you when I was nine or ten, I discovered the “Martian Chronicles”. I also discovered his short stories and “Planet” stories, which was an old pulp magazine that you used to pay $0.25 for on the newsstand. When I met Ray, I explained to him that after reading his books, I felt so different about myself and where I wanted to go in the world.

And that’s when he started talking about that sense of wonder. He warned me, “John, make sure that you don’t allow your sense of wonder to fall asleep. I meet a lot of people. I look into their eyes and I can tell something’s gone dead inside of them. Always let that sense of wonder keep your spirits alive.” Dr. Kent, I have followed that advice all my life and that’s why I’ve been able to write 15 books during my lifetime, of which “Horror Host” is just the latest.

Kent: Tell me about a couple of the others.

John: Well I guess I’m primarily known best for my “Creature Feature Movie Guide” series. There were six books in all. There hasn’t been a book now for a few years. The Internet has come to dominate a lot of areas of literature, I think. Things that used to get published on a regular basis, the publishers are less likely to want to go with some of those things. But I really enjoyed it; I used to see as many as seven or eight movies a week. I would review those films and then have them ready for the next edition, you know, just put them into the next edition.

Kent: Are you fond of the spoof horror movies? Are you fond of the really gruesome ones? What are your favorites?

John: I’m not fond of the gruesome films. In fact, I’m a little old‑fashioned. I really grew up on movies of the 1940s, where a lot would be left to your imagination. And I must tell you the first film that really frightened me ‑ I don’t know if it would frighten anybody today ‑ but given that time and place and my age of 11, was Howard Hawks, “The Thing From Another World”. It was one of the first movies to blend together elements of science fiction, UFO crashes where an alien is loose killing people, and the horror elements.

With the horror elements, all you knew was that this thing was in the ice, but you couldn’t quite see it clearly. And then later it had escaped from the ice and you didn’t know where it was. Boy, when you’re 11 years old, these are the kind of things that you just never forget. Same thing with “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, and also “Alien”. “Alien” is another film I don’t think anybody can see without being severely affected, one way or the other, by that terrible scene where the little baby alien creature chews its way through a human stomach and its head pops up.

Kent: I remember as a small child, I guess I must have been nine or ten years old. I had a similar experience with my first horror film. I was a fairly sheltered kid. We listened to a lot of radio. And I remember one night my parents were gone and I slept downstairs after they thought I was in bed. I turned on the TV and there was ‘Saturday Night Horror Feature’, and it was “Night of the Living Dead”.

John Stanley: Yes, that’s another classic.

Kent: I will never forget how terrified I was that night. I just sat awake all night.

John: See you have that memory. How old were you then, Doctor?

Kent: I must have been eight or nine years old.

John: Well see we have entire audiences that would watch our show on Saturday night and be exposed for the first time to films like “Frankenstein”, “The Mummy” or “Dracula”, and they would be at home with the mother and father, brother and sister or whatever the combination was.

And so years later, when Bob Wilkins and I would appear at conventions and we would be selling our books and DVDs, they would come up and say, “I remember you. I was growing up in the Bay area somewhere. I would be watching your show.” And each one would have an individual story to tell, but after awhile, I realized these stories were basically the same.

So the horror host becomes a symbol for that childhood experience where you see movies that scare you for the first time, or you’re young and impressionable. And it’s a nice feeling to know that there is a legacy that you have created. People still remember you fondly, years and years later. And that’s one of the reasons I wanted to write this book because no horror host has written a book before, not in the first person. And I hope that the readers, those who grew up watching those kinds of things will appreciate that.

Kent: Do you also talk about some of your guests and things like that in your book?

John: Yeah, the book covers the history of early horror hosts from the golden age of radio. Remember Nancy ‘The Old Witch’ and the ‘Inner Sanctum Mysteries’? I cover Vampira. I cover Elvira, who’s still today very popular. Ghoulardi. Zacharly. And then I get into the celebrity syndrome a little bit with Leonard Nimoy and Lucille Ball. I have a wonderful story on how Lucille Ball saved Star Trek from cancellation. Vincent Price. Christopher Lee. Ray Bradbury, of course. Robert Block was one of my favorites. He’s the one who wrote “Psycho”. Can you still remember your experience seeing “Psycho” for the first time?

Kent: Terrified.

John: Yeah, well the funny thing, and I use the word ‘funny’ purposely, about Robert Block is that he had a wonderful, macabre sense of humor. He loved word play, and he loved to sit and talk to you and use these little puns and things. And he would do it in such a droll way that I absolutely adored the man personally, and I loved to interview him. I interviewed him several times for the newspaper, and also he came and was on my TV show once.

I devoted, dedicated an entire two hours to him. You can take all the history of Bob Block; it’s just so rich. He was a writer of movie scripts, TV shows, a novelist, a short story writer ‑ just an incredible man. I took a lot of pictures of Bob, which are also in the book. The book has 559 photographs and many of them have never been in print before. So I hope that I’m establishing a little bit of horror/sci‑fi history here.

Kent: I have another question for you about TV horror. To what extent is TV today different than it was?

John: That’s a great question because it leads us directly to the cause of the demise of the horror host. Why don’t we see more of that sort of thing? Yes, Elvira is appearing around the country in that slinky, black, sexy outfit of hers. But there aren’t many horror hosts and the reason is cable television and the satellite came to dominate the world.

I remember my show was put on satellite in 1980, and it had to be taken off because there was a lawsuit. The station lost the lawsuit because the contract stated you could only send your signal to certain territories. Of course on the satellite, I was going all over the United States and Canada, and there was no control of territorial rights.

The whole idea of a package of films eventually became archaic and unnecessary. We have all our specialty channels now. You have to remember back in the 1970s, Doctor, there were only three major channels, with a PBS channel and a couple of independents. We had five or six stations to choose from. Today we have 500‑600, and that’s why you don’t see the horror hosts anymore.

Kent: I still have John Stanley on the line, author of “I Was a Television Horror Host”. It’s been fascinating speaking with him. Is your book available from Amazon.com and from stores?

John: Well I would prefer that folks go to my own website, StanleyBooks.net. And the reason for that is there is a way there they can order the book, but there are also some other features on there. I wanted to include a history of ‘creature features’ from a different perspective. So they’ll find some material on the website that’s a little different from what I have in the book.

They will also find a history of all of the 15 books that I have written, for those who are interested in that kind of thing. And I have a list of all the celebrities that I have interviewed over the years. People find that to be just fascinating to go down this list of such a wide range of people from so many different professions: radio, television, movies, the literary world and so on.

Kent: StanleyBooks.net to get all of those products. One more question for you very quickly, then I have to get to our musicians. Tell us what you did for Halloween this year.

John: It’s what I do every year, Doctor, I went over to my son’s home and a Bruin game here in the Bay area. And I spent two hours covering the neighborhood with my two granddaughters, who are nine and eleven years old. I wasn’t wearing a costume. I was just going up and down the streets with the kids, having a wonderful time. And then having dinner with various members of the family afterward. To me, that’s what I look forward to most on Halloween. I hope that’s not too anti‑climactic for you.

Kent: The true spirit of Halloween is with the kids and I think that’s great.

John: I think so.

Kent: Thank you for speaking with us, John Stanley.

John: Thank you. I’ve really enjoyed it very much.

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