Monsters, Ghouls, and Magic: The Old-Fashioned Ballyhoo of the Midnight Ghost Show
Despite all the changes to theatrical exhibition since the invention of the moving image, one thing has remained true: Showmanship is the name of the game. When there are employees to pay, snacks to stock, and lights to keep on, theater owners always need to find the right promotion to drive big business into their theaters, and when it’s Halloween time, audiences are in the mood for a good scare.
But back in the 1930s and 1940s, Hollywood studios were barely making horror films anymore with fear of upsetting the Hays office in charge of censoring the content in motion pictures. Universal, who practically created the horror genre in the early days of sound with pictures like Frankenstein and Dracula, had practically ceased producing horror movies by the late 30s; and when they picked it up again in the 1940s, the films were more like Scooby-Doo-type mysteries than anything we associate with the horror genre. Where could audiences go to be scared at this time of year? That’s where the midnight ghost show, frequently referred to as “spook show” would come in.
Where did the ghost show come from?
Ghost shows predated the movies by a few decades, as magicians and spiritualists (both real and phony) seized upon the public fascination with ghosts and seances by creating a magic act built around the spiritual world. In a darkened room, these magicians were able to create the illusion of moving objects, gusts of wind, and create ghostly visions with the aid of primitive optical effects that made people believe they were in the presence of an actual spirit. While seances would often be conducted in a secluded room, the ghost shows were meant for a wide audience and would frequently be included on a vaudeville bill with several other performers. If the person performing was a magician as well as a spiritualist, they would also typically throw in other classic routines like sawing a girl in half or any handkerchief trick.
While it’s impossible to say any one source first connected these ghost shows with the movies, most sources point to Elwin-Charles Peck (stage name “El-Wyn”) with performing a traveling ghost show in movie houses around the country, which he gave the catchy name of El-Wyn’s Midnite Spook Party. Here, the most popular technique used by El-Wyn was the “black-out” portion, which plunged the theater into total darkness to give viewers the biggest fright of the night. A number of other roadshow groups appeared following El-Wyn’s success, with such eye-popping names as “Dr. Silkini’s Asylum of Horrors,” “Dr. Psycho’s Asylum of the Occult,” “The Crawling Thing from Planet 13,” and “Dr. Ogre Banshee’s Chasm of Spasms.”
How did the ghost show work?
The contents of each ghost show would vary wildly depending on the production value, the amount of assistants and stooges placed in the audience, and the quality of the magician who hosted the show. Typical of a ghost show would be magic tricks that are more related to the supernatural, such as levitation acts or the imitation of ghostly presences throughout the theater via doors slamming shut or objects being moved of their own accord. When hypnotism became a popular trend among mentalists, magicians would often work a staged hypnosis act into their performances, training someone in the audience how to act for the crowd.
As the monsters from films such as Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Wolf Man became popular, shows frequently advertised that they would have a real live monster on stage and in the audience, often with the tagline that the creature was “direct from Hollywood.” The monster designs they used were so directly ripped off by the major studios that Universal sued Jack Baker (who performed under the alias Dr. Silkini) for using their copyrighted Frankenstein makeup, a few years before a costume company properly licensed the likeness from Universal and ghost shows from that point on used rubber masks for creatures instead of intensive makeup routines.
But the highlight of the show, and one that all noted ghost shows had, was the “black out” section that ended the production with a bang. At this point, the theater would be plunged into total darkness (several enterprising showmen would actually convince theater owners to bend fire law and shut off the exit signs as well!), and the assistants would wave phosphorescent drawings and portraits of skeletons, monsters, and ghosts around the audience. Frequently, if a monster had run from the stage into the crowd right before the black-out section, you would hear various monster noises and screams around the auditorium. And if the host could find willing volunteers, he would also paint a select number of audience members’ faces with phosphorescent paint to make them glow in the dark so the ads and posters could read something along the lines of “a monster will actually take a seat right next to you!” The production team would try to evoke as many senses in the dark as possible, such as tying wet strings to a pole and dangling them over rows of people so audience members felt something slimy brush up against them in the dark. And when all else fails, certain seats were wired to give viewers a shock sensation as if they sat on a joy buzzer.
When the black-out section ended, the lights would come up and the host would end the show, often being very pleasant and thanking the audience for participating in the act. Following the thank yous, the theater projected a horror movie (often a cheap B-picture) and the audiences went home smiling.
What made the ghost shows vanish?
Naturally, putting a show like this together is a big production, but in the classic days of movie palaces, hundreds if not thousands of people packed in to see them, and it was an easy way for theater owners to make money during any down season. Several of these touring companies would be on the road for 40-50 weeks a year, and were paid handsomely for their work.
And yet, as so many societal changes caught up with the theater business in the 1950s, the spook shows slowly folded. Weekly TV horror shows (sometimes hosted by old magicians of the spook show circuit) satisfied a public’s desire for horror. The remodeling of theaters to accommodate Cinemascope screens meant many theaters’ stages were removed entirely. Also, juvenile delinquency led to rowdier audiences and juvenile curfews in several major cities that meant teens - the ghost show’s strongest audiences - would not be able to stay out after midnight.
Today, the ghost show and spook show mostly lives on through the posters and trailers that these companies would make up to advertise them over the years. The cult and exploitation distributor Something Weird Video put out a whole series dedicated to the spook show with their release of Monsters Crash the Pajama Party, a 1965 featurette created specifically to play during spook shows. They famously loaded the disc with hours of old trailers, horror home movies, various posters and lobby cards, and other ephemera for this bygone era. Now, with haunted houses being such a boon and interactive horror theater making news around the country, it seems like audiences have never given up their desire to be scared, but will movie theaters ever want to bring back something like the midnight ghost show? Only time will tell!