One of the things that made Monster Kids happy, back in the day.It's October. My favorite month of the year—the entire 31 days are Halloween, as far as I'm concerned. I guess you know that something is wrong with you when you become visibly excited when your local variety stores have busted out the Halloween decorations... I guess that I've loved Halloween all of my life. Back when I was a wee little monster, there was a much bigger deal made about Halloween But, it seemed to lose something into adulthood. Or was it just me?
When I was growing up, kids went to school in costumes and hundreds of us went Trick-or-Treating; there were horror films and monster movies on all of the local stations and movie theaters (even more than usual in those days), and boy, did I love monster movies. I still do. Monsters were anti-social malcontents that I could live through—because they could express themselves with careless abandon and blatant disregard for societal order—it's no wonder children naturally gravitate towards them—we loved them!
During October, I would put on my own Halloween Parties in our garage, decking it out with dummies adorned with monster masks. I was also very lucky that my mother allowed me to decorate the spare room in our flat with all of the monster stuff I owned—including my collection of
Famous Monsters of Filmland and
The Monster Times and Aurora model kits—which also doubled as my own private screening room, where I ran those Super 8mm digests of feature films, such as THE VAMPIRE AND THE BALLERINA, all year round.
By the late 1980s, our local horror hosts vanished from the airwaves; and by the 1990s, even local movie theaters stopped booking horror movie marathons at Halloween. I guess that I lost the Halloween Spirit during that decade, and moved on to other interests—becoming a music and events producer (and also concentrated on writing about Japanese Fantasy Films). But, the spectre of
"Creature Features" was always creeping in the dark recesses of my mind.
After programming "Godzillafest" in 2004—a big 50th Anniversary celebration of Japanese Monsters—I knocked around the idea of staging an all-day classic horror movie marathon in San Francisco with fellow kook, Michael Monahan (aka
"Doktor Goulfinger"). While there were others doing Halloween-themed events across the Bay (most notably, Will "The Thrill" Vaharo's
"Thrillville" at the Parkway Theatre in Oakland), San Francisco had nothing.
Armed with our proposal, we approached another lifelong monster kid, Bill Longen, Events Producer at the
Castro Theatre. A former film editor at KTVU-2, Bill (who worked on "Creature Features" and ran "Trailers on Tape"), thought that we were nuts—and thus the
SHOCK IT TO ME! Classic Horror Film Festival was born. Now, running 8mm reels for the neighborhood kids, has mutated into screening 35mm prints for everyone who loves monster movies! Four years later, Halloween seems much blighter.
So, we hope that you'll join us for
SHOCK IT TO ME! on October 17th and 18th... We'll be
lurking for you!
