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A lot of nail heads have been hit squarely.

What made a great horror host production in the 1950s and 1960s are precisely the same elements that make good hosts and shows today. The host was someone already grounded in entertainment, someone who possessed television and on-camera experience. They knew how to relate to an audience, invisible and/or live, before the greasepaint ever touched their faces. They had timing and could ad lib. The great ones had personality. You can't beat a natural.

I give today's hosts a lot of credit for doing their best to keep a relic mid-twentieth century form of entertainment alive, but some of them are pretty wretched and others are, well, mediocre. I think the most prevalent pitfall is the reliance on "cool" as a substitute for talent. The result of that recipe is usually some form of obnoxiousness ranging from the benign to the malignant. If you have to manufacture the cool, you aren't. Zacherley didn't become The Cool Ghoul by Trying Too Hard. Still, hard work can pay dividends and through determination and considerable pluck some of the average hosts kept at it long enough to develop amusing, competent programs.

That said, a few of today's hosts would have held their own in the glory days of the monster craze. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, actress Linda Wylie (Linda has horror host experience, playing Nurse Moan-eek on Dr. Gangrene's Chiller Theater show on the WB) and I thoroughly enjoyed some season four episodes of Penny Dreadful's Shilling Shockers. The show is comprised of an attractive, talented ensemble cast that has entertainment experience outside of the program and it shows. Check out the episode "Carnival of Dolts," which showcases not only the the troupe's talents as they visit abandoned amusement parks throughout New England, but also includes an A Hard Day's Night style romp to a decidedly Beatle-esque musical number composed and performed by Rebecca Paiva, the show's director and editor. The show is exceedingly ambitious; watch an episode and you quickly see why Shilling Shockers has lasted seven seasons.

BTW, the actor who plays Garou has the coolest first name of anyone I've ever met. It's Magoo. Even looked at his driver's license.

Don Glut wrote:

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Yes. And though Bob was never actually a horror host himself, he appeared on a number of those old SHOCK-type shows playing everything from a werewolf to Mr. Hyde to a spaceman to a mummy and probably lots more. I used to go down to the set of JEEPERS' CREEPERS and watch him make-up Ghoulita, then play a character himself. Those were fun days.

I thought Bob Burns applied the make up to Lietta Harvey only for her audition as the character that would become Ghoulita. He told me he was pretty horrified by the character make-up that the show ultimately went with. The audition tape shows an attractive woman playing an insane, has-been actress (that was the intent):

This was the production make-up:

Bob Dalton hosted Tales of the Black Cat (though I've seen the show listed as Black Cat Tales in newspapers of the time). From what I understand each show was a complete episode about an investigator of some sort who also owned a black cat that helped him with his investigations. I think it was more akin to Lights Out except that the show had the two recurring characters. Though hosted by Dalton, I'm not convinced it qualifies as a hosted movie. If it does than the hosts of Lights Out (preceding Tales of the Black Cat by a couple years) would count as well.

I'm on the fence about whether or not the Swami is a horror host. He hosted movies, which keeps him in the running. Like the movies hosted by Vampira, his were mostly mysteries with a smattering of full-blooded horror films. That's kinda iffy. What puts Vampira over the top as a bonafide horror host is that there can be no doubt that the taxonomy of her character places her firmly in the order horrordae. Then again, the Swami is a character with supernatural powers and I think that keeps him in the running. Don found his characterization to be scary. I think that helps, too. But what would put him over the top for me is if he were intentionally scary rather than incidentally so. If the Swami intended to be scary (instead of, say, mysterious, which a little kid might interpret as scary), then, yeah, he might be the first horror host.

Wow!  This is actual behind-the-scenes footage of Marvin doing his show.  It includes footage of his jazz combo The Deadbeats (this could be footage from Marvin's Shocktail Party, the after-film show).  About half-way through, the film switches to rehearsal footage.  The audio is from a different episode.  The footage is very dark, but you can just make out Marvin, Dear (wearing a veil-like mask) and Shorty (the Frankenstein monster).

Along with the only known footage of Marvin's Shock Theater TV show embedded two posts above (including his house band The Deadbeats), these home movies of Marvin at the Lincoln Park Zoo and at Wrigley Field have been reposted on YouTube.  The audio is from home recordings taped from broadcasts of Marvin's show.