Chiller Theatre

Well, one thing I like about it is it scared the living hell out of me when I was eight years old back in the late 70s.

It was on Chiller Theater, the Bill Cardill show.

And it's one of those movies that it's a slow burn with a lot of atmosphere and spooky graveyards and fog and creepy sound effects and music.

And you're with his characters as they act like complete knobs.

So that's a pretty interesting scenario.

So how did this make your list? And what did you find most fascinating about this one? Tell us more.

Well, like Children, it's one of those movies I saw on Chiller Theater or WOR, any of those late night, Saturday night Chiller shows.

And it's probably my earliest horror memory as a kid, especially the red glowing eyes and the very end with all the Cossack zombies and all that stuff with the bleeding eyes.

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.

I was, um, I was a monster kid, which is a, a distinctly '60s thing.

Uh, uh, monster kids watched, you know, Chiller Theater and built model kits.

If you didn't build Aurora kits, you weren't a monster kid.

[laughs]

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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.

yes i i did that as well that was so many that people were like this is the best horror show i've ever watched i'm like well i guess i've never heard of that in my life so yeah i did come up with about 10. i don't know if they're all considered horror they scared

me they scared you yeah awesome awesome so if i'm gonna start because i have a block that is one two three four okay um that we can just get rid of all in in one fell swoop okay probably some of yours are on mine so we'll just yeah these are all anthology shows uh outer limits the twilight zone chiller theater and tales from the crypt yes each had a big i mean they were all scary i feel like uh outer limits was scarier than the twilight zone yeah that one was willing to push things a little bit differently than the way rod sterling was rod sterling was really really psychological

i like the twilight zone

i love the twilight

Yeah, so scary, so scary.

Yep, yep, yep.

And Chiller Theater.

Little me did not like that scary.

So,

I mean, you know, I grew up watching horror movies in the eighties and, um, know i grew up in the punk and the hardcore and the metal scene so um i kind of feel like even those three music genres combined all of them their cousin in the film world is horror you know um I mean, the earliest con that I ever went to, you know, was going to Chiller Theater.

So so it was it was always just something that I was, you know, I loved getting my mom used to scare me when I was a little kid.

So I guess that was my first introduction to horror.