A Halloween Tribute to Sammy Terry

The year might have been 1982. I was lying in bed in the back bedroom of my paternal grandparent's house, lightly dozing. I remember it was cold and dark outside, appropriately enough, and I had been thoroughly engrossed in thumbing through an old newsstand copy of Conan the Barbarian, the old black-and-white oversized mag Marvel put out in that era. I had found it sandwiched between one of my father's airplane mags and an old issue of Soldier of Fortune. On the television, used car commercials and weight loss infomercials suddenly gave way to something a little different, something I had never seen before. It was weird, eerie; even downright spooky.

A bell tolled.

Wind howled.

The screen shifted to a painting or phony stage background of a weird castle, perched on the edge of a dark, infernal cliff; no doubt overlooking a chasm with a straight, sickening drop to a churning, brackish river below. (What Poe might have called a "cursed tarn"?) The soft, whispery intonations of a woman sounded over the howling wind. What she said had the power of an invocation. And then, there she stood, holding a candle lighted in one hand, recalling a line from "Hotel California" by the Eagles. She prominently held a skull, I think. She whispered solemnly, as if in a mediumistic trance:

In the dead of night,

When the moon is high,

And the ill winds blow,

And the banshees cry,

And the moonlight casts an unearthly glow,

Arise, my love,

With tales of woe.

Oh, it was wonderful, dread stuff! And it sent a small child to a place he had never experienced before, "opening the gate" so to speak for a whole new set of inner feelings and thoughts that would, in the fullness of time, come to dominate and define him, at least creatively. The scene shifted to a television set of an old dungeon or crypt, a coffin opening up to reveal a man emerging. And what a character that man was. He was dressed in sepulchral, devilish black clothes with a red cloak, and had a white, skull medallion. His face was a whitish-green mottling of cadaverous hue, and his cloak fit around his head tightly, recalling the cloak Anton LaVey used to wear in the Sixties, minus the devil horns. He was perhaps a bit full in the cheeks to be so cadaverous a specter but, posh! No matter, he was altogether perfect, with his big ghoulish hands and his weirdly hollow, reverbed vocalizations, a somewhat comically ironic, bourgeois-sounding boogeyman. But his laugh! It proceeded upward from a mild chuckle to a booming, sinister, sardonic guffaw that sent the nerves jangling and running around, looking for an exit. On a fishing line, by his side, was the squeaky, ever-present rubber spider sidekick, "George."

Sammy Terry WTTV4: Tammy Millet, Ghoulsby, George, and Skull!

This was Mr. Bob Carter, a.k.a. "Sammy Terry," the greatest thing on local television as I was growing into adolescence. He was on, though, DECADES before I was born, hosting terrible, low-rent creature features, making appearances at drive-ins and Halloween spook houses (and maybe birthday parties and bar mitzvahs, for all I know), and generally doing his level best to evoke a sinister, fantasy persona that would live on in the hearts and minds of viewers long after the closing credits had rolled.

Sammy, in point of fact, was more memorable than many of the movies he played on his show.

Nightmare Theater

Horror hosts for late-night creature features were an enduring part of the Golden Age of Television: Zacherley, Vampira, Elvira, Ghoulardi, etc. were all eager contenders to be a top draw in their respective local markets, hosting television runs of the more than fifty films repackaged and sold to local stations by Universal Studios, a package that comprised some of the best (and worst) of their gothic, thriller, monster, and suspense films from the 1930s through the 1950s.

Sammy Terry, Mr. Carter, who began broadcasting on radio, sometimes as a replacement for Dick Clark on "American Bandstand," began hosting "Nightmare Theater" (then called "Shock Theater") in 1962, first as a voice-over for still images broadcast in between breaks in the movie. Later, the voice-overs became so popular, that the decision was made to develop the character of "Sammy Terry" (a play on the word "cemetery") as an on-screen presence, a snarky malevolent monster movie patron who tossed out ad-lib jokes and sometimes berated the low-quality pictures he presented.

Sammy went for decades, becoming one of the most recognizable faces in Indiana television history. Still broadcasting in the harsh video tones of the 1980s, he hosted contemporary films such as Fright Night, as well as classic and not-so-classic fare like The Horror of Party Beach, and Godzilla Vs. The Smog Monster.

Bob Carter died in 2013, but his son Mark has taken up the mantle of Sammy Terry, keeping the memory of a television institution alive (alive?) for a whole new generation of fans and fiends.

Long may the banshee wail, long may the winds howl and the moonlight glow, and...

...Arise, once more, with tales of woe!

Sammy Terry on YouTube

Sammy Terry on Facebook

Sammy Terry WTTV4: WTTV 50th Anniversary Special 1999