Horror Hosts Pick Their Halloween Double Features

Count Gore De Vol has hosted horror for more than fifty years, first on Washington, D.C. television station WDCA Channel 20 and then on the web, where Creature Feature made him the first horror host on the internet. He is still at it. New shows post at countgore.com, and no Halloween piece about horror hosts should run without him.

His double feature is one story told twice. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Don Siegel's 1956 original, followed by Philip Kaufman's 1978 remake. Twenty-two years separate them, and watching them back to back is the whole argument: the Red Scare paranoia of the original, then what the seventies did with it. Here is his case, in his own words.

Now this is a unique opportunity but the choices are tough. I'm going with two of my favorite films and they both have the same title: Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

I've always loved the original film from 1956 stars Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, Larry Gates and one of my favorite character actors of the era, King Donovan. It was directed by Don Siegel in stark black and white. The script caught all the paranoia of the red scare McCarthy era and held it throughout the film. Shot in wide screen SuperScope, it made scary good use of all the extra screen space with very dramatic framing. It's still a scary good film.

Then 22 years later director Philip Kaufman brought the same story back in color with an incredibly talented cast led by Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams and Jeff Goldblum. This film latched onto the vibe of the '70s and included some very exciting and tense cat and mouse chase scenes. They even paid tribute to the original by having Kevin McCarthy showing up, running through traffic warning drivers that the pods are coming. The script sets us up for a wonderfully shocking and memorable ending that people still imitate today.

We watched both halves before publishing. The 1956 original carries a Darkly Score of 8.2, with Atmosphere at 7.3 and Gore at 1.0. It builds its paranoia without a drop of blood, and our review calls it a blueprint for the imposter horror that followed, from The Thing to The Faculty. The 1978 remake scores 7.7 and logs four jump scares, trading the original's small town for San Francisco. Side by side, the original edges it for us, which is not the usual outcome for a fifties film against its seventies remake.

Penny Dreadful XIII has hosted Shilling Shockers since it first reached New England cable in 2006, working in the Vampira and Zacherley tradition of the costumed host who introduces the film and then gets out of its way. The show now plays in reruns, and she was inducted into the Rondo Monster Kid Hall of Fame in 2023 after two turns as the voters' Favorite Horror Host. She also hosts Terror at Collinwood, a Dark Shadows podcast that won the Rondo for Best Podcast in 2025, which turns out to matter to her second pick.

Her double feature is a witch program, and she went straight to the two Italians.

I'll go with Black Sunday and Suspiria. What better way to spend Halloween than with two eerie, witch-themed classics helmed by Italian horror maestros Mario Bava and Dario Argento, respectively? With Black Sunday, you get horror icon Barbara Steele in a dual role as the evil witch Asa and her descendant. In Suspiria, you get Hollywood royalty and Dark Shadows star Joan Bennett in a supporting role as Madame Blanc. And, if you're up for a witchy Halloween triple feature, let's add City of the Dead starring Christopher Lee.

Her word for both films is "eerie," and the Darkly Score agrees in a specific way. Black Sunday is the strongest of her three at 8.0, with Atmosphere 7.4 against Fear 4.0. Suspiria scores 7.4 and carries Atmosphere 8.3, the highest mark anywhere in this piece, against Fear of only 3.0. The City of the Dead scores 7.0 on the same shape, Atmosphere 7.0 against Fear 3.0, and its Gore sits at 0.5, about as close to bloodless as the catalog gets. All three run mood well ahead of fright. None of them is trying to make you jump. They are trying to make the room feel wrong, which is a different job and arguably the better one for a night that runs long.

Janet Decay and Grimm Gorri have hosted The Mummy and the Monkey out of Cleveland since 2014, playing public-domain horror and science fiction with skits in between, live on YouTube and Facebook most Fridays at 8:45 PM Eastern. They are the only duo in this piece, so they took a film each.

WNUF Halloween Special. Grimm picked this one because it gives off 1980's Halloween nostalgia, very heavy on the VHS craze. It's not a mainstream film and doesn't seem to get a lot of attention.

I pick Monsters Crash the Pajama Party. This film is only actually 30 minutes long, but the DVD is a whole experience that has tons of extra footage from haunted houses and old advertisements for spook shows from the drive-in era. It's super cheesy but super fun to watch, it's definitely a great flick if you're having a drink and a snack and hanging out with friends or carving pumpkins.

There are so many great horror films out there so it's hard to just pick one or two, but for Halloween night if you want some nostalgia and a little something different I think these offerings would definitely add some frightening flavor to your movie palate.

When it comes to Grimm and I arguing, this is a common ground we have, although on our show people have often seen us bicker back and forth. We have a lot of the same tastes in horror films, it's mostly cheesy LOL.

Grimm's pick scores 6.4 overall, but the axis to look at is Atmosphere, our measure of how strong and enveloping a film's mood is. WNUF Halloween Special scores 8.1 there, behind only Suspiria in this piece and level with The Wicker Man. I am a nineties kid rather than an eighties one, and the VHS-format nostalgia still landed on me completely, which is most of what that 8.1 is measuring. Its Fear is 2.0, which is the same finding from the other direction: frightening you was never the assignment. Janet's pick is a different kind of thing altogether, and it is not trying to be anything it is not. Monsters Crash the Pajama Party scores 4.0 with Fear 0.1, Gore 0.0 and Intensity 0.0, because a 31-minute spook show from 1965 exists to be fun rather than frightening. It works as an occasion more than a film, which is exactly how Janet pitched it: a room with other people in it on Halloween night, with a drink and a snack while you carve pumpkins.