With his blackened and silvering cowl of hair, nattily funereal wardrobe, and painfully dark cheaters, Austin’s only television horror host, Professor Griffin, clearly wants to scare the bejesus out of you. But why? He seemed like such a nice boy. To find out why, we spoke to the Professor’s alter ego, Joseph Fotinos.
“I grew up in Houston watching Boo Theater with Harold Gunn,” says Fotinos, “and so when I moved to Austin, being an actor who loves horror movies, I put those two pastimes together and came up with Professor Griffin. I remember watching those old shows and thinking, wow, this guy lives in a dungeon, he hangs out with monsters, and he gets to watch horror movies all the time — that’s a life I’d love to have!”
Umpteen Halloweens later, Fotinos, a former member of improv troupe Monks Night Out, can rattle off Vincent Price films and Forrest Ackerman quotes with the beast of ’em and has his own creeptastic program, Professor Griffin’s Midnight Shadow Show, both here and in Houston. A lifelong devotee of everything from those great old Aurora monster models to the legendary king of cathode ray spookers, Philadelphia’s John Zacherle, who created the groundbreaking Chiller Theater in the late Fifties, Fotinos’ obvious love of the genre is apparent in his between-film patter, which recalls nothing so much as the punning and creepified musings of EC Comics’ celebrated Crypt Keeper by way of Mel Brooks on a heavy dose of, er, deadly nightshade.
The show has taken off, helped along by some top-notch production values that put much of the rest of cable access programming to shame, and a pair of regularly irregular assistants in the form of the hunchbacked Dan-Dan and the luscious Usher. Clearly, it’s not just a Halloween thing anymore: Every day is Halloween when you’re Professor Griffin.
“The show has grown exponentially every year,” says Fotinos, “and now we’re attracting everyone from, say, people who have never heard of films like Horror Express to the local Goth and death metal crowds, kids, teachers, librarians,” and even, believe it or don’t, the Catholic priest who presided over Fotinos’ wedding.
“People ask me, what’s the difference? Why can’t we just go to the video store to get Roger Corman’s Bucket of Blood, and the truth of it is that the Midnight Shadow Show really has a sense of community about it. You’re watching these films at the same time that all these other people are, and so even if you’re sitting home alone, you’re not really alone. You’ve got Griffin and Usher and Dan-Dan watching right along there with you.”
The horror, the horror. How sweet it is.
Professor Griffin’s Midnight Shadow Show airs Friday nights at 11pm, Time Warner cable access Channel 16. On Halloween night, it airs for a four-hour marathon. You can find him on the Web at www.midnightshadowshow.com.
This article appears in Tom ‘Leatherface’ Delay.