Bruce Markusen - Hosted Horror on Television: The Films and Faces of Shock Theater, Creature Features and Chiller Theater

Where did my passion, or more accurately my veritable obsession with horror movies begin? I have vague recollections from my childhood, back in the early 1970s when I was no more than seven or eight years old, of reading a book that was filled with ghost stories and hauntings. It was the first book that I remember reading cover to cover. I seemed to recall Alfred Hitchcock being involved with the book, either as the author or simply as the editor who had chosen the stories for inclusion. I had a notion of it being a large hardcover book, with lots of great drawings.

For several years, I tried to remember the title of the book. No matter what, I just couldnt bring it back to memory. At one point, I started to doubt that Hitchcock was even involved, or that the book even existed. Perhaps it was something that I had imagined incorrectly, as we sometimes do when trying to recall the fonder times of our youth.

The identity of the book remained a mystery until the summer of 2016. One Saturday in June, I decided to go to the Cooperstown Antiquarian Book Fair. This annual event started back in the 1990s, but I had never attended until now. Walking across the gym floor of the Clark Sports Center where the book fair takes place, I happened to visit the booth of a Syracuse, New York, dealer. I looked up at the top shelf of his booth, and lo and behold, I saw the very book that I had been thinking about so often in recent years.

The book, Alfred Hitchcocks Haunted Houseful , was a compilation of the horror masters favorite stories of haunted locations. It wasnt as large as I had remembered, but it was still good-sized and had the same cover as my original copy, a color drawing of an old Victorian house featuring Hitchcocks head on one side! I had forgotten the specific details of that cover and its beautifully creative imagery, but it all came back to me that moment at the book fair.

For much of the 1970s, I simply loved this book, which had been published in 1961 but hadnt made it into our house in Bronxville, New York, until years later. This cherished volume was targeted toward children, or younger readers as the front of the book indicated. It had everything, from the entertaining short stories to the wonderful drawings, done in beautiful blue tones by skilled illustrator Fred Banbery. I simply had to buy this book, and more than willingly plunked down $20 for the privilege of having a copy, something to replace the original copy that had been lost in so many house moves years ago.

In talking to one of the owners of the Syracuse bookstore, I learned that Haunted Houseful was the first in a series of books that Hitchcock published during the 1960s. He told me that there were at least four or five in the series. The bookseller happened to have another one of them for sale, a volume called Monster Museum , which I had never seen before, but just had to have. So I invested another $20 and brought that home as part of my newly rejuvenated Hitchcock collection.

That night, I decided to do further research into the two books I purchased. (In looking up their entries on Amazon, I wanted to kick myself for not going to the Internet sooner. Had I simply entered Alfred Hitchcock as the key words to my search, I would have rediscovered Haunted Houseful so much sooner. How foolish of me.) As I worked my way through the pages of Amazon, I soon learned the identities of the other books in this series for young readers. They all had alliterative titles, from Spellbinders in Suspense to Daring Detectives to Sinister Spies. From there, I discovered a number of other books that Hitchcock lent his name to, books for adult readers that carried wonderful names like Alfred Hitchcock Pre-sents: Stories That Scared Even Me . I never realized that Hitchcock had put his name on so many of these books, numbering dozens in total.

When I first read Haunted Houseful back in the 1970s, I thought that Hitchcock had written the stories, or at least selected them for inclusion in his volume. As I thumbed through the book all these years later, I saw that each story had its own author. I soon learned that Hitchcock actually played no part in selecting the stories, or even writing the foreword. He simply lent his name to Haunted Houseful , as well as the later books in the series, receiving what I am sure was fairly healthy monetary compensation. That was a little disappointingI wanted Hitchcock to have some creative involvementbut it didnt dampen my enthusiasm for the book, the quality of the stories, and the beautiful renderings by the artist.

One of the books that came up in my Internet search was called Ghostly Gallery . When I saw the cover image, which showed a terrified young boy sitting up in his dark and windowless bedroom, with a human head forming the headboard and a ghostly figure standing in the closet, I realized that I had struck gold for a second time that day. This was the other Hitchcock book that I had once possessed, one that I had read over and over as a child, always enjoying the drawings along with that terrific cover image which wrapped around to the back of the book as well.

Haunted Houseful and Ghostly Gallery had stirred my interest on a variety of fronts. They motivated me to read more, which was extremely important in retrospect, but they also inspired me to want to experience more ghost storiesnot just in written form, but on the television screen. I wanted to see the movies that Hitchcock directed, at least the ones that fell into the realms of the supernatural and the broader world of horror, and I wanted to see other films that dealt with this subject matter. In short, these two books served as the impetus for me becoming a fan of horror films.

As part of this process, I began to search out horror films on television. They were somewhat difficult to find during the daytime hours, but as someone who liked to stay up late, I soon discovered that horror movies could be found more readily after 10 p.m., and sometimes after midnight.