Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, and Peter Lorre Play It For Laughs

Roger Corman's The Raven Offers Halloween Hilarity

Buried in a crypt, behind a hollow closet wall, down a winding, cobweb-filled staircase–well, it's in a file cabinet somewhere in my mess–is my passport to Transylvania. I qualified for it when I was 10 years old, sending the label from a Cocoa Marsh jar and two quarters, to the horror show host Zacherley. Zach (rhymes with Drac) hosted a monster movie show on TV in 1959 and 1960, when horror movies were going through one of its occasional boomlets. For many years, John Zacherley (also spelled Zacherle, his real name) was a disc jockey on a number of New York FM rock radio stations, including WNEW-FM and WPLJ.

I see no conflict here: as Vincent Furnier, aka Alice Cooper, will tell you, horror movies and rock were joined at the hip. Both were aimed at teenage and younger audiences, both liked to provoke a little outrage and some push-back from adults, both liked pushing the envelope of good taste.

My passion was driven by the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland, the creation of an entre…