You're probably still trying to regain your composure after witnessing Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, so this is probably a good time for me to take a break -- and to explain why all the films we've seen so far are from Universal Studios.
A bit of background might be helpful for my younger readers (assuming, of course, that I have any). I tend to jabber on a bit when talking about this sort of stuff, so please bear with me.
When I was a kid there were only four commercial TV channels in the Twin Cities. Three of them were affiliates of the big networks (NBC, ABC and CBS), and one was an independent.
In those days stations tended to lard their non-primetime hours with reruns of old TV shows (Hazel, Mr. Ed, McHale's Navy, I Love Lucy, etc) and with old movies. It seemed like there was always a movie running on some channel, from midday through the wee hours of the morning.
But it wasn't always so. It took a while for movie studios to see television as anything but a threat, and relatively few studio titles were licensed for broadcast during TV's infancy.
One thing that really helped to change this was Shock!, a package of 52 films licensed from Universal by TV distributor Screen Gems in August of 1957.
Screen Gems's idea was to license TV packages for many different genres of film, with horror only being one. But Shock! was an immediate and somewhat unexpected success. The original package consisted of 52 titles from the Universal vaults. They were:
The Black Cat
Calling Dr. Death
The Cat Creeps
Chinatown Squad
Danger Woman
A Dangerous Game
Dead Man's Eyes
Destination Unknown
Dracula
Dracula's Daughter
Enemy Agent
Frankenstein
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man
The Frozen Ghost
The Great Impersonation
Horror Island
House of Horrors
The Invisible Man
The Invisible Man Returns
The Invisible Ray
The Last Warning
The Mad Doctor of Market Street
The Mad Ghoul
Man Made Monster
The Man Who Cried Wolf
The Mummy
The Mummy's Ghost
The Mummy's Hand
The Mummy's Tomb
Murders in the Rue Morgue
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
The Mystery of Marie Roget
Mystery of the White Room
Night Key
Nightmare
Night Monster
Pillow of Death
The Raven
Reported Missing!
Sealed Lips
The Secret of the Blue Room
Secret of the Chateau
She-Wolf of London
Son of Dracula
Son of Frankenstein
The Spider Woman Strikes Back
The Spy Ring
The Strange Case of Doctor Rx
Weird Woman
Werewolf of London
The Witness Vanishes
The Wolf Man
The late-night "creature feature" format was largely built upon these films. And because these were titles that had previously been available only during theatrical re-release -- if they were available at all -- an entire generation of kids were seeing them for the very first time.
That led to the fondly-remembered Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine and to a generation of young filmmakers in the 1970s who had these movies burned into their brains at a young age.
A year after Shock! was introduced, Screen Gems unleashed Son of Shock!, which sported an additional 20 movies from the Universal archives.
Like many sequels, however, Son of Shock! seemed a bit flat and derivative. The films in the package tended to be pretty forgettable, with one exception: James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein.
1 comments:
SON OF SHOCK was absolutely necessary because it filled in the gaps left by titles that should have been included the first time around. The Columbia titles were a nice bonus, encompassing more Karloff and Lugosi, but inexplicably leaving out THE RETURN OF THE VAMPIRE. 1944's THE SOUL OF A MONSTER, with Rose Hobart and George Macready, is listed as part of the package in the 1989 book "Universal Horrors." 14 SHOCK! features never aired on CHILLER THEATER.
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