Ghosts and Laughs: Comedians as Ghostbreakers [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

The idea of a 'funny ghostbreaker' begins not in a movie, but on the stage. Paul Dickey and Charles Goddard's The Ghost Breaker: A Melodramatic Farce in Four Acts (1909) (listen to the novel version) came at a time when the occult detective was no longer cutting edge horror. Names such as Martin Hesselius, Dr. Abraham van Helsing, Flaxman Low, and Dr John Silence had become familiar articles in the weird mystery genre. Not until World War I was over would interest in all things beyond the veil revive and the ghostbreakers would catch their second wind. But in 1909, people wanted to laugh at the shadows, not fight them.

It wasn't long before Cecile B DeMille made the first silent version of the play in 1914. It was first remade in 1922 with Wallace Reid and Lila Lee, then again in 1940 and 1953 (but more of that later). What is important to grasp here is that the Dickey and Goddard play set in motion a common plot that would be recycled over and over. A young woman would inherit a haunted house and invite her new boyfriend to go along with her to see the property. While in the house, mysterious things would occur, probably some running, screaming, and carrying on. (In fact the 12th film in the Carry On series was called Carry On Screaming! (1966). This scenario is overly familiar to all of us from dozens of TV episodes and endless Scooby-Doo cartoons. In the worst Ann Radcliffe style, the monsters will be explained away, the young lovers will triumph, and the true ghostbreaker fan will be disappointed.

Walt Disney would play three ghostbreakers (Mickey, Donald, and Goofy) for laughs in “Lonesome Ghosts” (December 24, 1937). Other cartoons featured ghosts and haunted houses: Popeye’s “Shiver Me Timbers (1934) and a proto-Bugs Bunny in “Prest-O-Chango” (1939), for example. But only “Lonesome Ghosts” has dedicated ghostbusters who hire out to rid buildings of ghosts. These cartoons are all done for laughs, not serious ghostbreaking.

Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard made the next version of Dickey and Goddard with The Ghost Breakers (1940) and scored a hit. Hope is snide and Goddard fun and beautiful. And the island with the zombies is creepy enough. Like all other versions, no real monsters show up. All the films mentioned on this page are in black and white, adding to their horror feel; Hope's film most of all. It would be much harder to send funny chills down spines in vivid Wizard of Oz color.

Abbott and Costello worked pretty hard to get us to giggle in Hold That Ghost (1941), a film that tried to capitalize on Bob Hope's success, but fails for the most part because of the lack of any real ghosts. The boys did a better job of saving Universal and its 1930s monsters in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948).

The first and best of the franchise, it has our witless duo as baggage clerks who get the job of unloading real monsters at a wax museum. Dracula, played by Bela Lugosi, hypnotizes Bud and together they resurrection the Frankenstein's monster, all the while Lon Chaney Jr.'s Larry Talbot goes about changing into the Wolf Man. Boris Karloff turned down the chance to be Frankenstein's monster, but made up for it a year later in a film that bore his name.

This film spawned five sequels: Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff (1949), Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951), Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1953), a short for the Colgate Comedy Hour had "Abbott and Costello Meet the Creature From the Black Lagoon" (1953) and finally, Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955). Each of these recycled the same basic idea and got less and less funny, though they all made money.

The last official remake of The Ghost Breaker came in 1953 when Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis filmed Scared Stiff. There are more night clubs and singing in it, but in all important ways it is not all that different than Hope's venture back in 1940.

Television and Saturday morning cartoons claimed the province of the funny spooks in shows like Bewitched (1964-1972), The Addams Family (1964-1966), The Munsters (1964-1966), and I Dream of Jeannie (1965-1970). It would take Richard O'Brien's burlesque sex comedy The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1973) to make fans sit up and take notice again. First in a stage play (how appropriate) and then a cult film in 1975 starring Tim Curry, we see the same story again: Brad and Janet, boyfriend and girlfriend, end up in a haunted house full of weirdos, dancing and singing, and exploring their sexuality, all while an intergalactic power struggle plays out.

What all of these films lack is a true investigator of the supernatural. They are simply ordinary folk who fall into unusual circumstances (and are supposed to make us chuckle). Films such as Young Frankenstein (1974) and Shaun of the Dead (2004) have proven you can make a successful horror parody (much as Dickey and Goddard were trying to do with the ghostbreaker genre), but this requires that the audience have a collection of shared tropes to play off of. It took Dan Ackroyd (an actual believer in the paranormal) and Harold Ramis (not so much) to write and perform in Ghostbusters (1984) and Ghostbusters II (1989) to see if real occult detectives could be funny. The results fortunately were -- yes, they can.

Before we leave our funny ghostchasers, there is one other that needs mention. In comics, ghostbreaker spoofs were less common, though the Kolchak the Night Stalker television show did receive one lambasting from the Marvel Comics group in July 1975.

Marvel experimented with monster spoof comics with a title called Arrgh!. It ran five issues from December 1974 to September 1975. The series was edited by Roy Thomas. The majority of the strips used were based on the classic Universal monsters. In the fourth issue a parody of The Night Stalker TV show lead off with a 10-pager written by Jack Younger (aka Russ Jones). The artwork was penciled by Gerry Grandenetti (better known in the Warren magazines and undergrounds) and inked by Marvel staffer Frank Springer.

The level of humor is typical of a MAD Magazine parody with Kolchak becoming Karl Coalshaft. His boss Tony Vincenzo is Tony Vinagretto. The plot follows a pretty typical episode with Coalshaft's trying to get the big supernatural scoop and failing each time: first with a vampire, then a werewolf. In both cases, the police show up, riddle the monster with bullets, and it is up to Coalshaft to use his special weapon (that he always carries) to put them down. His camera captures pictures, but is always destroyed. The strip ends with him returning to his office and not noticing his boss is actually a vampire. Tony tries to kill him, but falls out the window. Coalshaft walks away, giving up on monsters forever.

What makes this parody so apt is that the writer had only to repeat what he had seen on the show to make it ridiculous. The juvenile name jokes and sight gags are typical, but what is actually funny is that the Kolchak show was this predictable and silly. That sounds like I'm not a fan, which isn't true. Like Chris Carter, who created The X-Files, I watched these shows as a kid and loved them. They inspired much of what followed in the occult detective line. Still... the show's faults are laid bare in this 10-pager. I suppose it's no surprise that it was cancelled after 20 episodes. "Monster-of-the-week" is a criticism that has been given the series, but you can apply that just as easily to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Charmed series, both of which ran for many years and have huge followings. I suspect what ultimately ruined Kolchak's success was the lack of a larger cast of characters and becoming formulaic almost instantly. (You have to remember the two successful TV movies that spawned it.) It was prominent enough to warrant this single parody... "The Night Gawker”.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Jeff Rice and Kolchak [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

Today is a good day to be a horror writer, whether in print or comics. If your work gets picked up by a cable network, you are on your way. Robert Kirkman made it big with his comic The Walking Dead, perhaps the most popular show on the planet. Kirkman wisely signed on as a producer. Now Blake Crouch is doing the same thing with the Wayward Pines show. Based on his novels The Pines (2012), Wayward (2013) and The Last Town (2014), he is now a producer and writer on the show. I don't know if this is a sign that agents are getting better at writing inclusion clauses or if TV executives are just finally getting that, yes, the original writer just might be an asset to the show. In the past, it wasn't so. Take Jeff Rice for instance...

I've always wondered how Jeff Rice was involved (or not) in the creation of the Kolchak saga and why he didn't use the show as a launching pad to a career as a popular horror writer. Reading his interview in a copy of Marvel's attempt at a Famous Monsters type magazine, the very enjoyable Monsters of the Movies #1 (June 1974), I found the inside story on his novel The Kolchak Papers. The TV rights were sold even before the book, with Richard Matheson scooping up the screenplay job before Rice could (and winning himself an Edgar Award for the task). Titled The Night Stalker (1972), the TV movie was a huge ratings winner, setting records for that time. It was followed by a second, admittedly repetitious, but popular, The Night Strangler (1973) and then Kolchak: The Night Stalker, the poorly regarded TV show of twenty episodes.

The original novel was eventually published as The Night Stalker after the TV movie aired. It had a picture of Darren McGavin on the cover, turning the show's inspiration into a mere after-the-fact marketing tie-in. Customers must have been a little confused by Rice's novel, which was intended to be a stake driven through the heart of Las Vegas. When The Night Strangler was produced, written again by Matheson, Jeff Rice got the job of writing the film into a novel, reversing the roles from the first book. The Night Strangler novel appeared in 1974. Both books sold very well. The Night Stalker, according to the Rice interview, sold half its copy run in the first month.

The Kolchak TV movies were making money too. Matheson and William F Nolan even wrote a third script about android replicas, but the network canned it in favor of the series. The only problem was that they didn't have Rice's permission to turn the movie series into a TV series, and he sued. Settling out of court, Rice was given credit as the series creator and Darren McGavin returned for the twenty episodes. This legal solution may have blacklisted Rice in Hollywood, ending any career in Tinseltown. Decades later in 2005, copyright was not a concern when ABC revived the show. Rice retained the rights to Kolchak in print, but not on TV. The new show did not last even as long as the original, only ten episodes. Somehow viewers knew something was missing, and that something was Jeff Rice.

The two paperbacks are all the books Rice ever wrote. Why? If I had two media-tied paperbacks, I would have struck a deal with the publisher for a series of books. Imagine Night Stalker #17: The Deadly Bees or Night Stalker #32: Project Deathbot. As one who remembers all the Man From UNCLE and Planet of the Apes paperbacks of the 1960s and '70s (ghost written by John Jakes, Keith Laumer, Bill Pronzini, and Frank Belknap Long),  this is a natural. Short, 60,000-worders with photo covers from the show. Only it never happened.

Because of the settlement, Rice was not allowed to use anything created by the show, only his original novel, making it hard to milk the occult detective cow for a few years even with the show faltering after one season. Only decades later, as Kolchak's cult grew, was this possible with Mark Dawidziak, a friend of Rice's, writing The Kolchak Papers: Grave Secrets in 1994. The novel did well enough to interest Moonstone Comics in a series, with tie-ins to other famous characters such as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Moreau. Jeff Rice appreciated that fans still loved Kolchak, especially after Chris Carter acknowledged that it was the show that inspired his popular X-Files. Still, no Jeff Rice resurrection came...

Rice's personal life is a bigger horror story than the novels he wrote. His father had been aligned with the mob in Las Vegas and Rice knew of its evils first hand, both from his private life and as a reporter. How did the original Night Stalker go over in Sin City with its anti-Vegas agenda? We can imagine all kinds of conspiracy theories involving black cars driving past Rice's house. Hard up for money, depressed and suffering from phobic paranoia, Rice remained a virtual recluse, writing no further books. He died under strange circumstances on July 1, 2015 at the age of 71. Even the sleaziest of entertainment programs made no mention of the fact. Hollywood had forgotten Rice in 1975 and that never changed.

Jeff Rice ends his Monsters of the Movies interview, which took place before the TV show, by saying, "The Night Strangler came out in February and is also doing record business. So, it looks like I am finally launched on a career as an author and, hopefully, I may soon sell my screenplays, as several producers have shown an interest. My career as an actor we won't talk about in this interview; at least the offers are coming in now." A frozen moment in time before the crap storm that was 1975. Hopeful, excited, ready for more. This is the Jeff Rice I like to remember. The man who gave us Carl Kolchak.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Kolchak: The Night Stalker Files #2

Earlier this week I reviewed The Spider #1 for Robot 6, but it’s not the only recent Moonstone book I’ve read. Nor is it the only one that offered an encouraging introduction to a character I’ve heard a lot about, but don’t have much personal experience with.

I do know a bit more about Kolchak than I did about The Spider. I have vague memories of watching a TV movie or two as a kid and I’ve checked out a couple of stories in one anthology or another, but none of those have actually helped the character for me. On the contrary, they gave me the impression that Kolchak’s misfortune and demoralization are such integral parts of the concept that there’s no hope that he’ll ever achieve any kind of success. I at least need the illusion that a hero may succeed, so when failure becomes a built-in part of the concept, I lose interest.

Still, enough people whose tastes are otherwise similar to mine enjoy Kolchak, so I keep trying to find a hook to grab onto. One of those people is Christopher Mills, so it’s appropriate that he’s writing Moonstone’s new comic series, which looks to be just the handhold I’ve needed.

I don’t know what happened in Kolchak #1, but I don’t need to because the second issue starts a new story arc. In it, Kolchak has been fired from yet another newspaper, but is on his way to Miami where he’s been offered a new job with a tabloid. One of the problems I’ve had with Kolchak in the past is that in the stories I’ve read he insists on being taken seriously as an investigative journalist, when he’s in fact Jack McGee from The Incredible Hulk. It might be overstating things to say that he’s embraced his McGee-ness in Kolchak #2, but he’s at least come to terms with it and is apparently being rewarded for it. Being rewarded – in my admittedly, very limited perspective – is something that’s long overdue for this character and it’s allowing me to move past Kolchak’s haplessness and enjoy the rest of the concept: a rumpled, unlikely monster-hunter.

And for his first case, he’s looking for a Florida skunk ape (in spite of the cover, which – while cool – has nothing to do with anything in the book), so I’m totally into that too.