The Dark Seance – Monsters Come Out of Screen! Invade Audience!

In the 1940s, a new kind of entertainment appeared in theaters all over the country. These midnight spook shows played to sold-out crowds in packed auditoriums and served as a bridge between the motion picture – which was already becoming, had perhaps already become, the entertainment du jour of the world – and the vaudeville acts of yesteryear.

To understand these shows, you have to understand that movie theaters at this time often still had stages in front of the screens, harkening back to when they pulled double-duty as vaudeville stages and picture houses. The midnight spook shows took advantage, combining what was essentially a magic act with a movie screening.

Today, the legacy of these midnight shows exists primarily in the form of their advertising, which made use of an unforgettable style of ballyhoo that still gets trotted out in everything from movie pre-shows to Etsy shops. The flyers, trailer reels, and other advertisements created for these shows are probably more dramatic and memorable than the shows themselves ever were. But many people, who have only ever experienced these flyers, have no idea what a midnight spook show was really like.

I didn’t either, until I read Mark Walker’s out-of-print 1991 book Ghostmasters, a heavily-illustrated history of the form. While midnight spook shows varied considerably from one to the next, and spook show pioneers guarded their production secrets as zealously as any other magician, sometimes even franchising them or selling them on to successors upon their retirement, these midnight spook shows generally shared at least a basic structure in common.

Spook Shows and Dark Seances

For starters, they usually really did take place around midnight, ensuring a spirited crowd of folks who were looking to stay up late and get, well, spooked. They were typically held in movie theaters – which, back then, generally only had a single screen and auditorium – and they consisted of three acts.

Most spook shows began with a magician doing a fairly routine stage performance. Sometimes, this demonstration of prestidigitation would have a suitably spooky veneer; other times it was simply a run-of-the-mill magic act. In either event, it usually preceded the screening of a short horror picture.

It was the middle act, the one which took place between the magician and the movie, that really defined the midnight spook show and set it apart from other entertainments before or since. This act was usually referred to either as the Blackout or as the Dark Séance, and it was deceptively simple. Rather than attempt to introduce new language to describe a Blackout, I’ll resort to quoting myself from an earlier piece:

“The lights in the theater were shut out entirely. Which, given that the auditoriums were packed to capacity with rowdy midnight crowds, was probably already chaotic enough. But then the magician and their assistants would introduce various spooks and monsters into the mix.

“Sometimes this meant a person in a monster suit, running down from the stage just as the lights were extinguished. Sometimes, it meant pelting the audience with fake rubber insects or anything else that felt creepy and crawly. In one humorous anecdote, Walker’s book recounts the story of an enterprising spook show operator who intended to introduce live bats but, unable to acquire them, substituted pigeons instead. The pigeons took a liking to the inside of the auditorium and proved impossible to displace for some weeks after the show.

“By far the most common element of these Blackouts were glow-in-the-dark ghosts and skeletons that were paraded across the stage, swung out over the audience on what were essentially fishing poles, or otherwise made to appear to ‘float’ in the air above the crowd.”

This rather lengthy quote is from an essay original to my book Glowing in the Dark: Writings on the Horror Film, in which I argue that William Castle’s gimmick films are the natural inheritors of this spook show legacy, a thesis that I will eventually be expanding upon in this column.

The key element that I think links the midnight spook show and the gimmick film is the idea of “breaking down the fourth wall and transforming the members of the audience from viewers to participants” (to quote myself again). Just as the ghosts, spooks, monsters, and creeps of the midnight spook show Blackouts literally came down from the stage and invaded the audience, so too do gimmick films often move the action from the screen to the auditorium in some way, getting the audience involved in a more direct and visceral manner than is possible when merely watching a movie.

Over the course of the coming months, we will explore these various methods of audience participation – and the films that utilized them – and how they link to the Blackouts of the midnight spook shows and that simple idea of monsters breaking the fourth wall.

When Tyler Unsell approached me about this assignment, he wanted a column exploring the history and legacy of the gimmick film. At the time, he was unaware of the essay that I just quoted extensively, and so was probably unprepared for the enthusiasm with which I would leap across the table and be like, “Yes! This is one of my weird pet obsessions!”

So, for the next however many months, we will be exploring gimmick films – those of William Castle, to be sure, but also their various precursors, successors, and imitators – and their link to the Dark Seances of the midnight spook shows. And hopefully, we will reveal that while the spook shows were, themselves, a relatively short-lived phenomenon that is largely lost even to history, their spirit is still with us, a glowing skeleton that occasionally comes swooping down from the movie screen and invades the audience.