You’ve probably heard of the iconic 1975 musical comedy horror film The Rocky Horror Picture Show, an interactive cinematic tribute to the horror and sci-fi B-movies of a bygone era that is traditionally screened at midnight. Nearly 50 years after its premier, The Rocky Horror Picture Show is still shown in many theaters in limited release, usually around Halloween, making it the longest-running movie release in film history. But the concept of the midnight spook show, including audience participation, is much older than Rocky Horror, even pre-dating film itself.
Mentalists, Mind-Readers, and Magicians
Around the end of the 19th century, public fascination with spiritualism, seances, and the supernatural was growing. With the advent of “magical” technology such as electricity, automobiles, and telephones, people began to wonder if scientific strides could lift the veil between the normal and the paranormal, allowing them contact with deceased loved ones or providing proof of the supernatural. An industry of impresarios emerged, creating traveling shows for both large and small venues to profit from eager, and sometimes vulnerable, audiences. Victorian era parlor acts featuring “psychic” performers such as Alexander (Claude Alexander Conlin) became popular, relying on psychological effects and clever observation to mystify audiences. Operating between 1915 and 1924, Alexander promoted his mind-reading and mystical abilities as the real deal, concealing the ground-breaking electrical stage effects such as radio earpieces that in fact enabled his parlor tricks.
In the early 20th century, performers calling themselves “mediums” and “mentalists” began touring, with shows promising communication with the dead, hypnosis, and mind-reading. Mentalists such as C.A. Newmann, under the stage name Newmann the Great, began combining séance elements with illusions such as levitation. After legendary stage magician Harry Houdini began a crusade in the 1920s to debunk “spiritualists” who he felt were taking advantage of grieving audience members, mentalism took a backseat to illusions in the mainstream magician’s repertoire. Houdini’s contemporaries, including Howard Thurston and Harry Kellar, incorporated supernatural-themed illusions into their magic acts such as levitation and disembodied heads, advertising their performances through posters depicting them communing with spirits, ghosts, and skeletons.
The Rise of the Spook Show
As the 20th century progressed, public taste in entertainment was beginning to change. Two World Wars and the Great Depression exposed people to unprecedented levels of death, destruction, and hardship, creating a pervasive sense of fear and anxiety. The horror genre provided a way to explore these feelings in a controlled environment, where audiences could experience and process fear and tension without real-world consequences. Already reflected in the popularity of pulp horror magazines, horror became a sought-after theme in movies and stage shows, pushing magicians and mentalists more toward the macabre in their performances, which often took place at midnight and became known as “spook shows.”
The early stage magicians such as Thurston and Kellar laid the groundwork for spook shows by popularizing the combination of illusions and supernatural themes. While Kellar and Thurston operated in the realm of family-friendly entertainment, their influence is clear in the transition to the darker, more horror-focused spook shows that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s. Spook shows took the same principles of theatrical magic and combined them with the public’s growing fascination with horror, death, and the macabre, which was reflected in early horror films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922).
A typical spook show was hosted by a “ghostmaster” who facilitated audience participation in a variety of stage tricks, simulated seances, and “blackout” sequences in which the theater would go entirely dark while costumed performers thrilled and terrorized audience members. Audiences were captivated by the promise of interacting with the supernatural, witnessing grotesque illusions, and experiencing scares in real time. During this unique transition period of entertainment, spook shows often combined a live stage show with a screening of a horror film either before or after the live performance. The film screenings enhanced the atmosphere of the live shows, presenting an immersive experience for audiences in which the line between the real and the supernatural was blurred.
Ghostmaster Stars
One of the first spook show performances was created by Elwin Charles Peck, stage name El-Wyn, in 1929. El-Wyn’s Midnite Spook Party featured psychic tricks, levitation illusions, and a finale blackout sequence in which simulated ghosts would flicker in and out of the audience’s vision.
El-Wyn’s Midnite Spook Party inspired other shows to follow in Peck’s footsteps, including what would become one of the most famous traveling spook shows, Dr. Silkini’s Asylum of Horrors, created by stage magician Jack Baker (1913 or 1914-1980), which ran from the late 1930s until the 1960s. This unique live performance combined elements of horror, comedy, and magic, including skits featuring a variety of characters led by Frankenstein’s Monster himself. During blackout sequences, Baker would engage the audience with props such as a damp rope, convincing participants that they were being touched by snakes. When Universal Pictures heard of Dr. Silkini’s use of their famous Frankenstein’s Monster, who was even played on stage by Boris Karloff’s body double from the original Universal motion picture, they initiated legal action against Baker. The ghostmaster responded by staging a private performance for studio executives, who then surprisingly agreed to allow Baker to continue using the character.
The Iconic Posters
The posters used to advertise spook shows were bold, often rendered in stark contrasts of flat color. They employed hyperbolic language to incite fear and curiosity, promising “live monsters,” “horrifying sights,” and the chance to experience the supernatural in person. Many of these posters would also feature frightening figures like skeletons, ghouls, and demons, giving potential audiences a taste of the terror they would face.
Aside from their captivating visuals, spook show posters often used sensational language, promising thrilling, terrifying, and otherworldly experiences. Phrases like “Ghosts Materialize!” and “Real Mummies Walk!” were common, blurring the line between fiction and reality. The poster for “Ray-Mond and His Blood Curdling Voodoo Show” offers audiences a “Show of 1001 Horrors,” including warnings that “monsters run loose in the audience” and “ghosts and ghouls sit next to you,” ensuring that audiences knew they were in for a visceral experience, not just passive entertainment.
The Spook Show Today
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is not only a tribute to old horror and sci-fi films, but also an homage to the midnight spook shows that once entertained audiences seeking catharsis from real societal fears. As theaters became more oriented to showing films (eliminating the stage under the screen) and the public gravitated to television in the 1950s and 1960s, live spook shows all but disappeared. Some “ghostmasters” went on to become TV horror show hosts, introducing matinees of televised horror and sci-fi movies. The concept of spook shows evolved, resurfacing in other entertainment genres, such as shock-rock musician Alice Cooper’s on-stage performances featuring guillotines and live snakes. And audiences today have demonstrated their enduring interest in the interactive midnight spook show by continuing to attend screenings of Rocky Horror dressed as their favorite characters, singing along to the musical numbers, and responding to the dialog in the most immersive way possible. Elwin Charles Peck and Jack Baker would have been proud.
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