Authors: Tim Curran
That was it. That was Wenda’s ticket. And that was also why she was out in the bus with the crew in the middle of the blizzard of the century (as it was being called). Maybe her
mom and her sister and her next door neighbor knew her as Wenda Keegan, but to the rest of the world she was Vultura, the host of
Chamber of Horrors.
In high school, there had been a few plays—
Our Town
and
The Corn is Green—
followed by some community theater and stagework in college, but it never led anywhere. She was a good strong alto, but she didn’t have the force to headline anything. Her dramatic skills were “stilted” as her drama coach told her at Stony Brook U. Upon advice from her mom—
it’s a pipe dream, Wenny, a girl like you working on the stage—
she switched to marketing and shortly after graduation landed a job at WKKX Channel 5 in Albany. It was a good position. She worked hard. Within four years, she was number two in the department selling air time and programming spots.
That’s when Morris discovered her.
Or discovered my legs and tits,
she decided later. Morris was a producer and director who had just moved from Manhattan to Albany and was overseeing shows like
Morning Edition
and
Cooking with Granny,
which, despite the title or maybe because of it, owned its time slot in the Capital District-Schenectady-Troy metro area. Granny was Miriam Clayton, a sixties-something farm woman with a razor-sharp wit, reams of down-home advice, and a collection of recipes that had made her not only a star but the author of two cookbooks. Morris was riding high at the station. The station manager, Lou Phelps, asked him to take on the Friday midnight timeslot. He wanted something young and wild and hip. And Morris, having grown up with Zacherley’s
Chiller Theater
and
Creature Features
hosted by “The Creep”, knew exactly what he wanted. Drawing upon WKKX’s extensive catalog of old movies, he created Vultura and
Chamber of Horrors.
All he lacked was Vultura herself.
Enter Wenda Keegan, WKKX assistant marketing director. A somewhat shy and high-strung young woman with bright red hair and sparkling green eyes, who had the legs and the impressive bosom to pull in the Friday night male viewership.
“But a horror movie host?” Lou Phelps said. “I don’t know. That kind of stuff went out in seventies.”
“Which is why it has to be re-introduced. Retro, man, everything’s retro. We’ve got the movies. Why play ‘em late at night or on Saturday afternoons? Why not repackage them with
Chamber of Horrors
hosted by Vultura? We’re not talking Zacherley or Svengoolie or Dr. Paul Bearer here, we’re leaning towards Elvira, Vampira. We’re selling sex here, Lou. It’s the only thing that
does
sell.”
“Who do you got for the girl?”
Morris told him. “This lady is a knock-out. Model pretty, she’s got the legs and tits and flirty eyes to keep the boys coming back. She belongs in front of a camera, not behind a desk hawking air space for Burger King and Pennzoil Quik-Lube. She has the look. She’s a little uncomfortable with it, but I’ll bring her around.”
And Morris did just that.
Forcing her to watch hours of 1950’s horror host Vampira and her later-day imitator, Elvira, Morris created Vultura from whole cloth…with a little help from Kansas City’s Ghostess with the Mostess, Crematia Mortem, and the all-too hilarious Ivonna Cadaver from LA. Wearing a ragged black dress cut thigh-high with a plunging neckline that showed Wenda’s charms to full effect, Morris had the makeup people paint her face ghost-white and lips midnight-black. The first color test shots weren’t grabbing him, though. That’s when he decided to do the entire thing in stark black-and-white, which would mirror a lot of the old scare flicks they were playing. A cobwebby set was built, lots of candelabras and faux-stone walls, an alternate graveyard set, and Vultura was off and running. With the long black braids and the makeup, Wenda lost herself in the character. Maybe as Wenda Keegan she was somewhat shy and unsure of herself despite her looks (again, maybe
because
of them), but when she morphed into Vultura and saw herself on the monitor in the shifting grays and guttering candlelight of black-and-white, she suddenly knew the character and had no trouble pouring on the juice in her low seductive voice. Unlike Elvira, Vultura took her movies and herself absolutely seriously, laying on the sex hot and heavy reminiscing about her favorite dank tombs and coffins she’d laid (or
been
laid) in while discussing movies like
Curse of the Living Corpse
and
The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake
as if they were artistic masterpieces of mood and subtlety and not low-brow creaky late show fare.
It worked.
It worked 100%.
In six months her salary doubled,
then tripled. Advertisers lined up. There were remote shoots at record stores and nite clubs, live feeds from cemeteries on Halloween night. They started with old late-night standbys from Universal—
The Ghost of Frankenstein
and
Creature from the Black Lagoon—
and Technicolor Hammer classics—
Plague of the Zombies
and
The Brides of Dracula
—but soon enough Morris realized the movies were absolutely secondary so they started running Grade-Z programmers like
The Bride of the Gorilla
,
Frankenstein’s Daughter,
and
Zontar: The Thing from Venus.
Morris was right.
It mattered naught.
Most of the stuff they showed was easily available on DVD, what
wasn’t
available was
Chamber of Horrors
and Vultura herself. The movies got worse and the ratings got higher. Go figure. They spent more air-time in the dungeon with Vultura and her cohorts, assembling dozens of subplots amongst the renovated dungeon complete with the stretching rack (where Vultura was to be found at the opening of each show, lots of leg and heaving cleavage, tied down and being stretched, screaming out her joy), hanging cage, and Diabolical Den (which sounded like a 1970’s Aurora monster kit). It was this latter set that was the home of the Graveyard Girls (Megga and Bailey), two strumpet vampiresses seething with barely concealed lust who spent a lot of time talking about sucking things—
I’d like to sink my teeth into that—
and licking other things—
Mmmm, I can practically taste it now
. In their low-cut vampire girl gowns with ample charms on display (breasts often pressed up against one another), they became an instant hit, sleeping together in the same coffin and practically tonguing each other on camera…and launching a hundred masturbatory fantasies.
As
Chamber of Horrors
moved into its second season, it was programming gold. It was syndicated on twenty-three stations across New York, New England, and the Midwest. The month of October was always busy, Vultura and her crew showing up at costume stores and haunted houses and Halloween-themed parties. They made the horror con and comic book con circuit, always promoting, promoting, promoting. The cons were fun and fans lined up to see them. They all wanted their pictures taken with Vultura or Doc Blood or sandwiched in-between the Graveyard Girls. Wenda always had fun and played it to the hilt…the only fans that bothered her were the ones that panted on her and had sticky fingers, other than that it was a riot.
The format was set. Every episode started with Vultura stretched on the rack, writhing and screaming to a Goth metal soundtrack. Then came the Graveyard Girls
, who were practically a soft-core lesbo act by that point. And finally, Doc Blood. Doc, formerly “Sawbones McCord”, was a stage magician whose credentials included weatherman, Shakespearean summer stock, college drama instructor, juggler, and a corny magic act straight out of the old midnight spookshows. But he had something and Morris saw it. Before long, Doc Blood was a popular part of the show as he regularly staked the Graveyard Girls (a lot of gasping and orgasmic cries during the obligatory penetration), sawed them in half, or took off his own hands with a meat cleaver, popped his eyeballs out, and yanked strings of bloody razor blades from his mouth. It was cheap stage horror, cheese sliced thick, that might have appeared ludicrous and cornball in color…but in black-and-white, it was oddly effective.
That was the show.
And that was why they were going to the ghost town of Cobton. They had a ski lodge in the Adirondacks lined up to sponsor a month’s worth of shows. They wanted some snow scenes. Next week it would be at the lodge, this week the ghost town. Morris had searched high and low for the latter. There were dozens up in the Catskills, but most were nothing but overgrown foundations, rusting mine works, or a still-standing chimney or two. Few had roads leading to them anymore and nearly all were impassable in the winter without snowshoes. Then he found Cobton: a fully restored village from the 18
th
century that was a tourist trap of sorts—and, unfortunately, one not much visited—during the summer. The family that owned it was more than happy to rent it out to
Chamber of Horrors.
They even supplied a pair of caretakers. Of course, it cost WKKX an arm and a leg to get the roads leading to it plowed open. They were all secondary roads closed in the winter. But it would be worth it because the ski lodge was picking up the tab.
“Maybe an hour’s work,” Morris had said. “A few exteriors, some interiors. We’ll splice it together back at the studio.”
Originally, they had tried to do it the cheap way, filming a few test shots at the studio with fake snow but the whole thing came off looking like an outtake from an Ed Wood movie, footage from
Plan 9 from Outer Space
that had hit the cutting room floor. Shit even old one-shot Eddie wouldn’t use.
Morris wasn’t about to try and sell that off to the ski lodge.
They’d fucking laugh,
he said. No, they had to do a location shoot and that’s all there was to it. Some good shots in the old town by night, lots of shadows, lots of atmosphere. Let Jekyll and Hyde—his pet names for Bailey and Megga—do their thing and get the testosterone rising while Doc Blood crept about with Vultura holding center stage, deadpan ghoul to the last, showing lots of skin while she discussed the merits—or lack of the same—concerning the movie, which would either be
Snow Creature
or
Half-Human,
both of them Grade-Z abominable snowmen flicks from the 1950’s (this keeping with the snow theme of the ski lodge itself, of course).
“Location, location, location,” Morris had said, finding himself amusing as always.
Wenda hadn’t been crazy about it from the start and that feeling worsened with the blizzard, but she was contracted and she had no choice. Dressed in her Vultura costume—more flesh than costume—she figured if she didn’t catch pneumonia or take out somebody’s eye with a stray nipple in the cold, it would be fairly easy.
And that’s what brought them to Cobton.
The ghost town in the hollow below that was pitch black in the night.
4
Burt opened the bus up gradually, picking up speed
to meet the first of many snowdrifts that had blown across the road. Everyone gripped their seats and waited for it. The winding road that fed down into the hollow was maybe two city blocks in length, twisting and turning, the cemetery they had seen earlier clinging to a high hillside off to the right now. If they’d have been able to walk straight from there to Cobton, they would have been in the town fifteen minutes ago. It wasn’t far as the crow flies, but the road seemed to carry them farther away from the town before bringing them in closer.
Here it comes,
Wenda thought,
I can just about feel it.
The thing was, she was not sure what she was
waiting for. She was tensed like a cat, her fingers gripping the seat like claws. Her heart was pounding hard but it didn’t seem to be in her chest but from somewhere much lower like it had dropped down into a well. She could hear it in her ears—distant, muffled—kind of like the heart of the old man in Poe’s story: the dull, quick sound of a watch enveloped in cotton. This was the way she felt before they shot
Chamber of Horrors
each week. Nervous, her heartbeat fluttery, her hands shaking just a bit. Threaded with an anxiety that was pure apprehension that only faded when she got into her Vultura get-up. Realistically, she knew, she should have been more panicky and self-conscious scantily clad as Vultura, but it was never that way. In character, she was calm, resolute, and confident, things she never was as herself. The reason being that she was no longer Wenda Keegan. No longer a walking basket of nervous tics and indecision and petty angst, she was someone else and that person—even if they happened to be a ghoul—was perfectly comfortable within their own skin.
“Some of these fucking drifts are heavy,” Burt said, ‘we’re going to have to punch through them. Hang on tight.”
“Christ, and here I thought we’d do this thing without a fatality,” Morris said.
“Such is the nature of existence,” Doc Blood mused.