As regular readers of this blog may recall, I grew up in northern California in the 1970s, and part of my formative experiences with the fantastic involved Creature Features originally hosted by the late Bob Wilkins, and later by John Stanley. John recently contacted me to let me know about a new feature-length documentary on the program as well as some of his other materials, and this led to an hour and a half phone call where John shared his background and experiences in becoming a television horror host. Below are highlights of our conversation.

TheoFantastique: How did you get involved in horror, sci fi, and fantasy? What was your personal interest and how did this shift into a professional arena?

John Stanley: People can read the expanded version of this in my book I Was a Teenage Horror Host (Creatures at Large, 2007), and this is also explained in my documentary I Was a TV Horror Host: The John Stanley Story. It really starts when I was about six years old. We lived in Oakland, California and my father would take me over to San Francisco on Saturdays to the Telenews Theater at Fifth and Market. It was a theater that specialized in showing nothing but news reels (if you can believe that). Next door to that was a small movie theater that played double bills, and so after we had seen the news reels we’d go next door and that’s where I was introduced to westerns, musicals, all the things that were considered mainstream genre movies of the time. Sci fi and horror were not as predominate in the 1930s and 1940s. It wasn’t until about 1951 with Howard Hawks’ film The Thing From Another World that connected to the idea of UFOs that was growing across America at the time. That was a movie that really stunned me. I was afraid to walk down an empty corridor for the rest of the summer. We also saw The Man From Planet X which was the second feature. I thought here was something I hadn’t seen much of before. That same summer of 1951 saw The Day the Earth Stood Still, and when Patricia Neal is confronted by Gort and goes into the flying saucer I thought she utterly captured the emotions of terror and fear. This struck me.

So this is where the origins of interest in sci fi and horror began, accompanied by the EC Comics around the same time. I remember discovering Vault of Horror, Tales From the Crypt, Weird Science, and Weird Fantasy. You had horror, sci fi, and war, and later with MADyou had satire. Then there were the pulps, and when you’re young and impressionable there’s nothing better than to see a monster holding a beautiful girl with a very short dress or ripped blouse. And insides the pages of those were these wonderful stories and some of these stories were by writers like Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, and somehow these names began to stick. I was also brought up on pop music that today would be part of the swing era, and one day I was watching a film called Distant Drums with Gary Cooper and I was taken by the unusual music, atmosphere, and music so I stayed over for the second screening to see the name Max Steiner and I wrote the name down to see if I could find his name and music elsewhere. Film music then became a passion that consumed me. One movie that had a strong impact on me was a war movie called Between Heaven and Hell with Robert Wagner. In his autobiography he dismisses this film but what he doesn’t know is what an influence this movie had on me at the age of sixteen and my friends who were with me. We were drawn into this incredible war story by the music and especially by one scene where Wagner runs down the side of this mountain, and the music just carries you with him. We stayed to see this movie again just to see this moment at the climax of the film again.

Also not only the names of composers but also directors were coming to my mind. My dad took me to see The Steel Helmet, a war movie, perhaps the first about the Korean War, and I was hearing dialogue like I had never heard it before. There’s a scene with a young Korean boy gets killed named Short Round (the use of this name in one of the Indiana Jones films finds its origin in this war film). A Chinese officer pulls a note off the dead boy and reads the plea of the boy and he sneers and throws the paper on the floor. Sergeant Zach is standing and watching and he empties his gun into the officer’s body, shoots down an unarmed man because of what he’s just said about Short Round. That was one of those unforgettable moments at the movies.

My childhood experiences shaped me into becoming the kind of person who might want to work at a newspaper and write about these things.

TheoFantastique: How did you connect with Bob Wilkins in his horror host work in the Bay Area?

John Stanley: I was a copy boy at The Chronicle in San Francisco. I had a temporary writing job that eventually ended after the summer but after that the people at the paper had a new respect for me. There was a movie critic there and each week I would write a movie review and leave it next to his desk and he read it and called me over to critique my view. Each week I would continue to do a review and eventually when he was on vacation with his wife he told me the paper might ask me to fill in and write a review. The paper did, and it was Mysterious Island, Ray Harryhausen’s special effects film. This was the beginning and I was able to later focus on interviewing major television and movie stars which became my speciality over the next few years. Sci fi and horror was never my specialty, only part of what I was doing, although it was a significant and important part. So if you visit my website you’ll see the celebrities and people I’ve interviewed, and many of them come from these genres. I felt interviewing characters from these genres were just as important as interviewing Jimmy Stewart or anybody else from more mainstream genres.

In 1968 you’ve only got a few channels available for television viewing, and cable was a new concept. Fortunately for us if we didn’t have cable where I lived I wouldn’t have been able to see television. One Saturday night I’m watching KCRA Channel 3 out of Sacramento and Bob Wilkins is on there and he’s screening a horror film. I was so impressed and it was so unusual in that while I was aware of horror hosts on radio I had not seen them on television. As a result I wrote a letter to Bob and he wrote back to me. I made a phone call to Bob and he made a phone call back to me. Soon Bob realized he had made an important connection because I worked for a major newspaper, he had a show in Sacramento, and occasionally I would find an excuse to get a mention of Bob in the paper. He called me one day and said he was coming to the Bay Area leaving Channel 3 and going to KTVU Channel 2 with a new show in prime time. Tom Breen, the executive from Sacramento was going to Channel 2 and put Bob into prime time to take the horror host concept with a new approach. He was on at 9:00 p.m. opposite Saturday Night at the Movies and sometimes Bob’s ratings were the highest.

Bob was the host of Creature Features from 1971 to 1978 and it’s in November that I’m working at The Chronicle and it’s a Judith Morgan Jennings who is the publicist for Channel 2. She let me know that Bob was going to retire, and I thought this was a great story for the paper so I called Bob. He was returning to the world of advertising. Bob asked me if I thought about trying out for the job and I told him no. He said I should because I knew the genres. I tried out a few weeks later for the job because I knew the format, I had contacts in the media and public relations world and I thought that maybe I could use those to bring people into the circle for both the paper and television. But I never harbored any thoughts that I would get the role because a lot of established radio and television personalities were trying out for the role. I took it as a fun moment to try to get the part. They gave me two weeks to prepare and we shot some material for an introduction. I did the audition but turned to my wife thinking I had blown it. A couple of weeks go by and I didn’t hear from anybody, and I found out on Christmas eve that I got the job. It was a happy and frightening moment as I wondered how I was going to fill Bob Wilkins’s boots. I continued Creature Features from 1979 through 1984. I knew you can’t copy somebody else you just have to be yourself. Search for what you have that’s special that works. Bob took me under his wing and trained me. After a couple of weeks he let me do my first show. Soon after that Bob left the station. We’d only run into each other at times as Bob became a major advertiser in the area. 

TheoFantastique: In the documentary American Scary Joe Bob Briggs calls you the “Leonard Maltin of horror” with your book The Creature Features Movie Guide (Boulevard Books, 1997). How did this project come about?

John Stanley: I had written a couple of game books that had been professional published. I had written a novel called World War II through Avon, a war fantasy novel, originally titled Napalm Sunday. I had also written Bogart ’48 about Humphrey Bogart through Dell Books and that did very well. Avon then asked me to do a novelization about a black private eye. So I had some prior writing experience.

A friend of mine worked for a printing company here in San Francisco which used to bring out variety books. He came to me one day when I was doing Creature Features and he asked my why I didn’t do my own horror guide. I told him I didn’t know anything about self-publishing, so I read up on it around 1981 and did a first edition which did modestly well. Then Warner Books of New York saw the book and liked it and asked for a new edition which came out in 1984 around the time that Creature Features went off the air. There have been six editions of the book and it has done very well.

TheoFantastique: You are currently very busy promoting some materials that look at the history of Creature Features. Can you summarize some of this?

John Stanley: The documentary is called Watch Horror Films, Keep America Strong and it runs 75-minutes. It is a very narrow focus on just one horror hosted television show, Creature Features, but it will be of appeal to not only fans of that show but also of horror hosts in general. I’ve been selling this new documentary to people all over the country. This focuses on Bob Wilkins’s show and my follow up after Bob retired. It includes interviews by both of us, and with Bob’s wife Sally, his son Rob, and his daughter Nancy. It also includes interviews with filmmaker August Ragone, Ernie Fosselius of Hardware Wars, Bob Shaw a movie buff who helped Bob in his early years at Channel 2, and Planet X magazine editor/publisher Scott Moon.

It also includes my 50-minute documentary I Was a TV Horror Host: The John Stanley Story. In this I take you into the Half Moon Bay Cemetery and then into a journey into everything that influenced me in my youth, how I came to replace Bob, I take you to the Castro Theater, the only movie palace left that is open in San Francisco to show the theater environment I grew up in. I also interview Bill Longen, my film editor at Channel 2 who helped me with my mini movie takeoffs on feature films that included Return to Casablanca, Little Shop of Mysteries, and Adventure of the Persian Supper. Then I take you back to Channel 2 to the original station which has since been torn down, and then to the new station and end the film on the note of keeping up the old tradition, “Watch horror films, keep America strong.” I also found some old promos I did with Leonard Nimoy, Buddy Epson, Chuck Norris where we do thirty second promos for the series. There’s also a short featurette called “The Sacramento Years” which shows Bob in Channel 40 doing his horror show simultaneously while doing the show in the Bay Area, and he didn’t quite that show until 1981, so we could say that Bob Wilkins was a horror host in the Sacramento area for almost fifteen years. So he was a very busy guy. This is included in the bonus features.

TheoFantastique: How can people learn more about these materials and where can they order them?

John Stanley: They can go to www.stanleybooks.net and use Paypal or other methods, and the other website is www.bobwilkins.net. Whichever website they would like to go to is fine.

TheoFantastique: John, thanks so much for talking with me. You and Bob were an important part of my childhood, and you talk about your own formative experiences with film, Creature Features was part of mine which shaped my present interest in the fantastic, so this has been a pleasure to talk.