Bill Cardille

Night of the Living, Night of the Living Dead.

Um, well, basically, um, Chilly Billy Cardille had a, had a long-running horror show in, in, uh, Philadelphia called Chiller Theater, and, uh, the, the guys up at, uh, Image 10, they, uh, were watching the program, and he showed The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price.

And they'd b- had been sitting around, I think they had been toying with the idea of trying to do a feature.

They were industrial short, uh, um, studio.

And, uh, they all looked at that and said, "Oh, we can do better than that." And out of that came Night of the Living Dead.

And Bill Cardille, Chilly Billy Cardille, uh, actually appears in the film as a reporter.

He's the one who's talking to the sheriff about the zombies, "Oh, they're all messed up." Um, and, uh, they use the station Channel 11 helicopter in, in that sequence as well.

So, um, there's, there's a, there's a horror host who inspired one of the groundbreaking horror movies of all time, and then years later, his daughter was in, uh, Dawn of the Dead.

Um, so we had, yeah, we had that guy.

We had Chilly Billy Cardille in Pittsburgh.

Oh, nice.

Famous local horror host-

... movie.

And, and I have to say, when I watch it now, it reminds me so much of the landscape and just the people that I knew growing up there in the late '60s, early '70s.

And when they rattle off, uh, all of the little towns and the kind of like, you know, emergency centers, and I'm like, "Yep, that's, that's like the mental map of the Pitts- the, of, of the Greater Pittsburgh area in my head." So, uh, but, uh, yeah, Chilly- Chilly Billy was great.

Y- you know, he w- he was from the old sort of, you know, Zacherley kind of Goolardi school of horror hosts.

Well, uh, how I got started was, uh, through, uh, just a- an interest always i- in, in science and in legends and mythology, uh, from f- as a young child Uh, my, my mother, who was a, an English teacher for over 25 years, encouraged me to go to the library every week- Mm-hmm ... to check out books, and so I, I always have had a voracious appetite for learning.

And growing up in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area, uh, when I did, uh, there was a, a very famous Saturday night show called Chiller Theater with Bill Cardille as the host.

Mm-hmm.

And they used to show campy, uh, extraterrestrial and monster movies on Saturday nights, and, and my young friends and I used to like watching them because the good guys always won, and the- Mm-hmm ... extraterrestrials and monsters were not scary.