Svengoolie’s MeTV October Schedule Is Here & It’s Frightfully Fun
Every day is Halloween for Svengoolie … so that makes the actual Halloween season an extra special time in his TV lair. As part of his annual Halloween BOO-Nanza, Svengoolie will be showing double features every Saturday night in October as part of his MeTV series Svengoolie Classic Horror & Sci-Fi Movie.
So grab your bag of fun-size candy and get ready to spook yourself all the way to Halloween.
SON OF FRANKENSTEIN, US lobbycard
First up, on Oct. 5, we have Son of Frankenstein. In this 1939 Boris Karloff/Bela Lugosi film, Dr. Frankenstein’s son (Basil Rathbone) meets a spooky blacksmith, Ygor (Lugosi), who holds the body of the Creature (Karloff). This was the first Universal Pictures horror film made after the studio took a two-year break from the genre, following the release of Dracula’s Daughter in 1936. The studio was inspired to bring back the films after noticing the success of a five-week revival of Frankenstein and Dracula at a Los Angeles movie theater. It was Lugosi’s return to the screen after an extended period of time without work.
THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD
It’s followed by 1957’s The Monster That Challenged the World. In this film, a giant evil mollusk is running amok in California, and it can only be stopped by Audrey Dalton and Tim Holt, who came out of retirement to shoot this film. It was written by David Duncan, who would go on to pen ’60s sci-fi classics The Time Machine and Fantastic Voyage.
Everett Collection
The Oct. 12 lineup begins with Don Knotts’ classic 1966 haunted house comedy, The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. Knotts plays Luther Heggs, a nervous newspaper typesetter with big dreams of becoming a reporter. But what if the only way to realize those dreams is to … spend the night in a house that was the site of an infamous murder?? This isn’t just Knotts’ first project after The Andy Griffith Show; the concept actually comes from an Andy Griffith episode about a haunted house, and it was written, at Knotts’ request, by two writers on the series.
FIEND WITHOUT A FACE, 1958
Then, finish the evening with the bizarro 1958 sci-fi tale Fiend Without a Face! In the film (which was made in Britain, but is set in Canada), an old professor’s experiments with telekinesis and thought projection turn his thoughts(!) into evil, brain-shaped monsters! Though the film had a very small budget, the creatures were made with stop-motion animation techniques. When the film was promoted in the U.S., an animatronic dummy of one of the creatures created such a sensation outside New York City’s Rialto Theater, police demanded its removal.
HOUSE OF WAX, Vincent Price, 1953
On Oct. 19, begin your Saturday night spookfest with the 1953 Vincent Price classic House of Wax. In the film, Price plays a man who gets trapped in his own wax museum as it burns … and goes on to seek murderous revenge by turning people into wax dummies. The first color 3D film released by a major studio, House of Wax was one of the most popular movies released in 1953. And ironically … the director, Andre de Toth, was blind in one eye, so he couldn’t experience any of his own film’s 3D effects.
TriStar/Everett Collection
It will be followed by a Svengoolie premiere! For the first time, Svengoolie will present the 1986 Jim Henson dark fantasy film Labyrinth, which features Jennifer Connelly as a teenage girl who must rescue her baby brother from Jareth (David Bowie), the big-haired Goblin King. The film is the second collaboration between Henson and conceptual designer Brian Froud, following 1982’s The Dark Crystal. Even if you’re a fan of Labyrinth, you probably don’t know that the script was written by Terry Jones of Monty Python!
20th Century Fox Film Corp./courtesy Everett Collection
On Oct. 26, kick off the spookiest Saturday of the year with 1952’s Invaders From Mars. In the film, a flying saucer crashes in a small town and alien invaders begin possessing the townsfolk. The film was directed by William Cameron Menzies, the man who invented the concept of “film production design.” He is most famous for having designed the burning of Atlanta sequence in Gone With the Wind.
©Universal Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection
Finally, end the night with a film that scared countless ’80s kids whose parents thought they were taking them to a Muppet movie: Jim Henson and Frank Oz‘s 1982 dark fantasy film The Dark Crystal. The film follows Gelfling Jen, who seeks to restore harmony to his world by retrieving a mystical crystal that can overthrow the evil Skesis. At its release, the film was billed as the first live-action film to have no humans onscreen, and its puppets were the most cutting-edge to exist at the time; some required four puppeteers at a time to operate.
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Each first film airs at 8pm and second film airs at 10:30pm ET on MeTV. Which movie are you looking forward to the most?
HALLOWEEN Collector's Issue
October 2021
This super-sized issue looks at the horror franchise that started them all, HALLOWEEN
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