SHADOW THEATER (1990-1991)

 Shadow Theater was a terrific series hosted by Robert “Freddy Krueger” Englund. Everyone over the age of 30 remembers a time when you couldn’t just go to the internet to get your fix of info and footage from fringe and/ or obscure horror films. This program was a nice once-a- week documentary look at movies for the Psychotronic- minded.

An additional plus about the show was the way it treated viewers to behind-the- scenes facts and rare interviews with some of horror’s most daring filmmakers without having to attend a fan convention. (It’s a joke! Lighten up!)

Robert Englund displayed the same macabre charm he would employ when hosting the Horror Movie Hall of Fame ceremonies later in the decade. He didn’t copy his patented Freddy routine, but rather  approached the material with a morbid tongue-in- cheek humor that was reminiscent of some of the best B-Movie hosts of the past crossed with the dark cartoons of Charles Addams.

His most notorious stunt while hosting and narrating Shadow Theater came when he was nonchalantly sowing shut the lips of a life-sized baby-doll while talking about the films to be examined in that particular episode. The outcry from the kind of people who spend their lives feeling offended by anything and everything provided a spate of free publicity for the show.

Memorable Shadow Theater episodes included a look at overt and implied lesbianism in Hammer vampire films, a tribute to Stuart Gordon (Reanimator, From Beyond, Dolls ) a detailed examination of Dario Argento’s body of work, a Lucio Fulci retrospective and comprehensive features on then-out- of-the- way horror film series like the Phantasm and Evil Dead movies. 

Here’s hoping my fellow fans of forgotten television can dig up a lot of clips from this show and give it a much larger presence on Youtube than it presently has. 

FOR MORE FORGOTTEN TELEVISION SHOWS CLICK HERE: https://glitternight.com/category/forgotten-television/