What do you get when you combine a horror movie audience, a spiritualist séance, and a haunted house attraction? Beginning in the 1930s and lasting into the 1960s, midnight ghost shows were ghoulishly chaotic, wonderfully campy 4D theater performances that accompanied the scary movies of the era, beloved by a mostly-teenage audience who often became a part of the show themselves. Schlocky showman Chelsey Weber-Smith tells Sarah about how magicians-turned-ghostmasters used paranormal parlor tricks, gory skits, and marketing gimmicks to create a new form of vaudevillian dark comedy. As horror obsessives, Sarah and Chelsey muse about what it would have been like to attend one of these late night wacky fright fests that paved the way for the happily trashy theater camaraderie of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Digressions include the resilience of the horseshoe crab, dollar store competition, and plot holes in the movie High Tension (2003).

More Chelsey Weber-Smith:

Listen to American Hysteria

Original music in this episode is produced + performed by Magpie Cinema Club

(except for Harry Belafonte's Zombie Jamboree which is, in fact, from 1962.)

Listen to their cover of Season of the VVitch

Produced + edited by Miranda Zickler

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