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Spook show giveaway -- picture of Elvis

Three more posters...

propmaker wrote:

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austex-

Thanks for posting all these images. It's been a blast!

You're sure welcome! I enjoyed sharing them. Spook Shows are a nearly lost chapter in the history of horror entertainment and I'm glad to do my small part in keeping their memory alive.

Victor Frankenstein wrote:

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Yeah, it's interesting, Austex, because I grew up in the 80s and I have no clue what these are. So these were travelling shows of live performers/sets that accompanied screenings of films?

  

Prior to the 70s, many movie theaters had stages in front of the screen. With the general decline of non-musical live entertainment -- vaudeville, live theater, etc -- clever magicians hit on the idea of producing traveling magic and effects shows that tied into the interest in spooks and horror. Generally, a spook show would consist of a live magic act -- often involving illusions like sawing a woman in half, setting someone on fire, etc. -- possibly a horror skit, featuring a guy in a monster costume (Glenn Strange and Lugosi both appeared in spook shows during low points in their careers) -- and a "blackout" -- a session wherein ALL the lights in the theater would be extinguished and various glow-in-the-dark ghosts, skeletons, etc would appear in the theater. The stage show was followed by one or two horror films. While spook shows go back to the 20s, they really hit their heyday in the post-war era and faded out in the early 70s due to changes in audience tastes, the decline of movie houses with stages, public liability laws, etc.

The roots of these things go back to 19th Century performers -- seance-holding magicians and the "phantasmagoria" of the magic lantern era -- but for the most part they are a uniquely American form of entertainment that existed for a brief period and then vanished. By most accounts, the quality of the shows varied widely -- some of them were very professional magic shows while others were cheap and corny. But the advertising is -- to me at least -- uniformly interesting for its imagery and general lurid excess. There are a few online repositories of stories and pics, and some other resources mentioned up thread, but the whole area is pretty obscure and undocumented.

There are occasional attempts to recreate the shows. For instance, I saw a blackout at the Thrillpeddlers Grand Guignol performance last year in San Francisco that really gave the flavor of the one I saw as a kid. The nearest descendant of this lost art is probably the haunted houses and theme parks that spring up around Halloween, though they obviously don't have the same ties to movies.

Shadow Chaser wrote:

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It's probably noteworthy that "Dracula" appears nowhere on that poster, but I don't know if that was because the promoter was being discrete or whether there was a legal action preventing it. There is a fellow on Ebay who sells very nice repros of that particular item and occasionally original posters as well. I believe his collection and others are featured in the upcoming Spook Show trading card set from Monsterwax.