Midnight Monster hop goes retro
About 1 million households in the Pittsburgh area will have a chance to watch scary movies and enjoy local skits Saturday nights if they tune into “Midnight Monster Hop.”
The weekly show is produced by HSTV Studios, which is owned by the Herald-Standard, and hosted by Ricky and Karen Dick, owners of Castle Blood, a haunted house in Beallsville. The show, which features a classic monster movie as well as locally produced skits, is similar to the former “Chiller Theater,” which aired from 1964-83 on WPXI Channel 11 in Pittsburgh with host Bill Cardille (also known as “Chilly Billy”), according to Ricky Dick.
“Midnight Monster Hop” will begin airing this Saturday on RTN (Retro Television Network). Since October 2006, the show has been broadcast to an estimated 30,000 homes in southwestern Pennsylvania on Atlantic Broadband Channel 19.
But now the audience will be expanded to as many as 1 million households when it is broadcast on RTN’s Pittsburgh affiliate owned by WPXI, according to Wesley Ellis, manager of HSTV Studios. RTN is broadcast on Atlantic Broadband Channel 112, Armstrong Channel 410 in Connellsville and Comcast Channel 207 or 110.
“RTN gives us a much bigger scope, and we’re very excited about the opportunity,” Ellis said in a recent interview at HSTV Studios.
Ricky Dick said it was easy to pitch “Midnight Monster Hop” to RTN executives because they understood the old “Chiller Theater” format.
“RTN airs old television shows, and they like to include some local nostalgic programs on their affiliates,” Dick said. “When the first show airs on RTN on Saturday night, we will be going back to the original show that aired in October 2006 on Channel 19. This will give the new audience a chance to get to know the characters from the beginning and to follow the story lines.”
If “Midnight Monster Hop” proves that it is marketable in the Pittsburgh region, Dick said RTN executives could decide to expand the show to its other 30 affiliates located across the nation.
“That would be great because the only thing we would have to do is to send the tapes to other affiliates that may decide that they want to air ‘Midnight Monster Hop,'” Dick added.
Dick explained that the TV show is a natural extension of the haunted house that he operates in Beallsville with his wife, Karen.
“We have characters and sets at the haunted house that we use for the shows. We don’t take ourselves seriously, but we take the show very seriously,” he said.
As a matter of fact, the Dicks take the show so seriously that they were recently nominated for a national horror fan award. Gravely MacCabre and Grizelda, the characters played by Ricky and Karen Dick on “Midnight Monster Hop,” were nominated for a “Best Horror Host” award through the Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards, which recognize the best in monster research, creativity and genre appreciation.
“We heard that the names of about 40 people or so were sent in, and they culled it down to 13, and we’re on the list,” Dick said. “That’s not too bad for a relatively new show. Some of the folks on the list have been on their shows for more than 10 years.”
“Midnight Monster Hop” airs for about two hours. It features old horror movies and about 20 to 25 minutes of original content, including skits, spooky stories and commentaries on movies.
“It’s supposed to be funny in a creepy ‘Adams Family’ way,” Dick said. “The shows are filmed at Castle Blood. The attraction is very similar to taking a tour of the ‘Adams Family’ or ‘The Munsters’ house. Those are viable formats because people are still watching reruns of those television programs today.”
Dick said teenagers and college kids watch “Midnight Monster Hop,” but the family-friendly show also attracts young adults and families.
“We have some people who tell us that they tune in because they remember watching ‘Chiller Theater’ when they were kids,” Dick said. “But we don’t have the ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘Dracula’ package like they had on ‘Chiller Theater.’
“We do have movies featuring well-known actors like Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Vincent Price,” he added. “Some of the movies date back to the 1930s, and they’re black and white, but we have shown movies that are as recent as 2004. We try to mix the movies up. We don’t like to show two vampire movies in a row.”
Karloff is best known for his role as Frankenstein in the 1931 black-and-white classic film “Frankenstein.” Lugosi played Count Dracula in the 1931 movie “Dracula” based on Bram Stoker’s classic vampire story, according to Web sites.
Price is remembered for his roles in many low-budget horror movies made in the 1960s, specifically Roger Corman’s adaptations from Edger Alan Poe’s “House of Usher,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “Raven” and “The Last Man on Earth.”
On any given week, Dick said the locally produced skits can feature any of the 25 cast members from Castle Blood.
“Any character from the haunted house can have bit parts in the skits,” he said. “The two-hour show has commercials, which pay for the production.
“The fact that we have ready-made sets at Castle Blood greatly reduces the cost of producing the show,” Dick continued.
“HSTV comes to Castle Blood. They run big cables into the house, and we’re good to go. The skits are usually related to the movies,” he added. “The skits give people a chance to see the day-to-day operations at the castle.”