The Dark Seance: Monsters Crash the Pajama Party

The midnight spook shows that had packed houses throughout the 1930s and 40s had already begun to wane by the 1950s, but not everyone was willing to let them go. The final decade of the era of spook shows still saw plenty of performers intent on capturing the attention of audiences by showing them ghosts, tricks, and magic – and scaring their pants off, to paraphrase William Castle.

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The spook show business had changed following the end of World War II, however, and so had the people sitting out there in the dark. “The audience that started to attend these late-night attractions were much younger,” writes Mark Walker in his book Ghostmasters. “They were fourteen to seventeen years old – the junior and senior high school crowd. Many of these youngsters and their dates had never seen a stage show. They wanted action, not psychic mind reading stunts. Ghosts meant horror, not tame Halloween spooks.”

What’s more, studios had churned out dozens of monster movies during the war years. “These films introduced [teenage viewers] to the mummy, mad scientists, and wild apes,” not to mention the likes of Dracula and the Frankenstein monster, writes Walker. “Since these characters were what kids thought of as synonymous with fright, magicians who operated ghost shows of the post-war years introduced them into their acts. Their programs took on a macabre theme with the emphasis now on eerie creatures and mutilation illusions, rather than ghosts and spiritualistic tricks. The midnight spook show had evolved into the midnight horror show.”

One of the spookologists who carried on the midnight horror show into the 1950s was Joe Karston, who Walker describes as “a talented booking agent, promoter, and conjurer.” Kartson was apparently no mean magician in his own right, having invented illusions such as the Toy Soldier and the Girl in the Pumpkin, and he sometimes headlined his own midnight shows – but he also employed a stable of other magicians, which allowed him to produce a number of spook shows at the same time, among them Dr. Macabre’s Frightmare of Movie Monsters, Dr. Satan’s Shrieks in the Night, and Dr. Jekyl [sic] and His Weird Show.

Karston was a showbiz rival of Jack Baker, better known on the spook show circuit as Dr. Silkini, whose Asylum of Horrors was hailed as “America’s foremost thrill and chill stage revue.” He hadn’t gotten where he was by underestimating the competition, either, and he was known to train his understudy magicians by taking them to see Silkini’s show.

Among the innovations that Karston helped to introduce to the spook show format was “an unprecedented finale whereby he obtained licenses from motion picture companies to present a series of famous movie creatures,” in this case played by Karston’s employees, wearing over-the-head masks created by Don Post.

For those who don’t know Don Post, he is a legend among aficionados of Halloween masks. He started his company in 1938 in Chicago, Illinois, and he secured a lasting legacy in monster history when Don Post Studios became the first company to commercially sell full over-the-head latex rubber Halloween masks.

You’ve seen a Don Post mask, even if you don’t know it. In 1975, his company produced a line of Star Trek masks, including one of Captain Kirk – the mask that was purchased and altered to make the pale visage of Michael Myers in John Carpenter’s Halloween. Post was later hired to make the masks for the sequel Halloween III: Season of the Witch.

While pretty much every spook show involved a short horror movie at the end, most of them had relied on movies produced by the big studios, even when they were playing B-list ones. Karston went one better: In 1965, he released his own short horror film, Monsters Crash the Pajama Party, to tie in with his midnight horror shows.

Monsters Crash the Pajama Party was directed by David L. Hewitt, who had “started out as a teenage illusionist” in one of Karston’s traveling stage shows. With the help of none other than Forrest J. Ackerman, publisher of Famous Monsters of Filmland, Hewitt got enough cash together to start making movies on a shoestring budget. Among the earliest of these was Monsters, which “was supposed to be a feature but when edited ran only a scant thirty-three minutes.”

Rather than abandoning the project, Hewitt drew on his experience touring with Dr. Jekyl and His Weird Show, and “created a new live stage show around Monsters wherein a monster, played by Hewitt, would leap from the screen when lightning flashed in the movie, cueing a battery of flashbulbs to go off, momentarily blinding the audience. Each show had a girl in plaid pants planted in the theater, who would be kidnapped by the rampaging creature and carted off backstage before the eyes of a horrified crowd. She would then appear on the screen as part of the movie.”

Karston liked this idea enough that he booked it, and also connected Hewitt with a cartel of vending machine owners who would finance his next feature, The Wizard of Mars (1964). Shot on an “incredibly miniscule” budget of only $33,000, Wizard of Mars nonetheless boasts a surprising number of low-rent special effects sequences, as well as a gimmick of its very own, dubbed “Ultra Depth.”

What was “Ultra Depth?” According to Fred Olen Ray, it was nothing more than hidden flashbulbs, each as large a 100-watt light, that were triggered at certain points throughout the picture.

The vending machine operators were impressed, however, and formed American General Pictures, with Hewitt in creative control. AGP distributed several subsequent movies, and is perhaps best known for putting out Jack Hill’s cult classic Spider Baby in 1965.

Meanwhile, Karston had seen what producing a low-budget horror feature of his very own could do for his shows, and he continued to do so, this time re-releasing several Ray Dennis Steckler pictures with new titles. The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1964) became The Teenage Psycho Meets Bloody Mary, while The Thrill Killers (also 1964) became The Maniacs Are Loose.

These releases all made use of the same gimmick, albeit under a variety of different names. “Horror Vision,” “Bloody Vision,” “Hallucinogenic Hypno-Vision;” they all amounted to more or less the same thing – “during the movie a few people wearing rubber masks of the movie’s characters would run down the aisles and try to scare the audience in the theater.”

Not all of them went as far as including the plants that were used for Monsters Crash the Pajama Party so that the rubber-masked monsters could actually step back into the picture with their victims, but they all made use of similar ballyhoo, with ads boasting that the films were “so shocking we can’t advertise what’s in it,” and featured monsters that “run loose” and “sit on your lap!”

As for Karston, well, he did what anyone who made a killing promoting schlocky monster shows would do – “retired and moved to Redondo Beach, California, where he parlayed his investments into condominiums and fast-food businesses.”