Our theme for the 2024 season, Creature Feature, is an immersive experience designed to evoke the classic monster movies of the 1920s - 1950s.
As usual, all details of the Marathon presentation and format for this season were meticulously crafted to support this experience.
History
Broadcast on television from the 1960s through the 1980s, the original Creature Features were collections of classic & cult horror, science-fiction, and monster movies from the 1920s through the 1970s; these included the classic Universal Monsters, the British Hammer horror films, and Toho’s kaiju monster movies, just to name a few.
These films would usually run on Friday and Saturday nights at 8:00PM, but this would vary from city to city. As broadcast rights for films became more expensive in the mid-1980s and the younger demographics turned to gaming and other new forms of media, Creature Feature broadcasts began to become more and more scarce, with 1983’s Misty Brew's Creature Feature in the Cape Girardeau area being the last known regular broadcast of the original format in the United States.
There have, however, been a number of revivals of the format as special presentations over the years, including Cinemax’s Creature Feature special event in 2001, Creepy KOFY Movie Time in San Francisco running from 2009 to 2019, and the return of Misty Brew’s Creature Feature in 2014 on YouTube.
Aesthetic
As the heyday for Creature Features was during the early television boom in the 1960s films broadcast during this period, resulting from the limitations of early television technology and condition of the original prints, were often extremely fuzzy with a high grain and lacked stereo audio (understandably).
Additionally, many of the films shown were cult classics and low-budget features with cheap sets, not-so-extravagant costuming, and poor writing. These factors, combined with the limited presentation offered by early television, greatly contributed to (and some would argue established) the classic “B-movie” hallmarks and aesthetic we still recognize today.
Dracula, Dir. Tod Browning & Karl Freund, 1931
The Blob, Dir. Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr. & Russell S. Doughten Jr, 1958
Godzilla: King of the Monster!, Dir. Ishirô Honda
After establishing the new show format with 2023’s Grindhouse, we were able to try a new approach for Creature Feature.
Now that we didn’t need to dedicate a bunch of time and energy into figuring out a new format for the show (and now that the new season didn’t have to be a launchpad for anything), we were free to put all our focus into continuing to provide a unique experience that celebrates a specific era of film; basically, now that the new format was locked, we had time and energy to have fun and play with it.
We had a lot of fun emulating the look of dirty 1970s cinema with Grindhouse so we wanted to try to mimic another style, and decided on the aesthetic of old monster movies from the 1950s and 1960s. Using this as a starting point, we created Creature Feature as an immersive experience designed to celebrate classic 1950s horror in all its forms.
(tl;dr: our head programmer really wanted to play with creating proper, comprehensive black & white edits and bullsh*tted an entire concept around it as an excuse)
Preshow
For Creature Feature we simplified the preshows by cutting out most of the visual elements; as they’re meant to be background noise for the countdown to showtime, there’s really no need to craft a preshow that requires actually sitting and watching it.
As a result, we elected to select a variety of vintage horror radio shows from the 1920s to the 1960s and, along with an ambient backdrop and visual countdown, utilize these tales of terror as our preshow. Thankfully, there’s been a lot of fantastic work done to restore and preserve these shows; due to the sheer volume available, we were able to select a show for each night that fits in perfectly with the feature presentation.
Shorts
Our archive of spooky shorts and TV episodes was expanded yet again this year to include more original shorts and episodes of shows that aren’t necessarily Halloween-themed, but are still spooky or creepy, allowing even more variety in our pre-feature selections.
The shorts (along with their pre-roll commercials) have received the same treatment as the main feature, and will run in special black & white edits designed to emulate the television viewing experience of the 1950s and 1960s.
Additionally, we have allowed the shorts (on nights with shorter runtimes) to extend to 45 minutes instead of a hard limitation of 30 minutes or less. We figure if it’s a good watch, it’s a good watch and an extra 15 minutes won’t hurt.
Ads, Bumpers & Trailers
The pre-feature ads, bumpers and trailers really didn’t receive any major updates other than an expanded library to choose from.
For Creature Feature, we elected to run all pre-feature ads, trailers, and bumpers in color. By doing so, we were essentially able to split the entire presentation into two segments: a preshow and short evoking the experience of watching horror television in the 1950s and 1960s, when the original Creature Features were broadcast, then jumping back to our regular experience as a virtual repertory theater for the main event.
Feature Presentation
As with Grindhouse, the look, feel, and overall treatment of the feature presentation were the driving factors behind selecting a theme for the 2024 season. The idea of doing a season of films that had been given a proper black & white conversion had been kicked around for a while so, after creating and watching a proof-of-concept test reel to make sure it would work, we finally decided to go for it.
However, we didn’t want this treatment to be gimmicky, and we certainly didn’t want the removal of color to be detrimental to the overall experience, so special care was taken and these edits were refined over and over again to ensure each film’s conversion looked its absolute best and enhanced the tone and aesthetic of that film.
(click to enlarge and compare)
Untreated Film
Simple Desaturation
MOTM Edit
It’s subtle and hard to pick up on small stills, but on a larger screen with motion the details really pop out; deeper blacks, brighter (but not blinding) whites, and a slight fade to the film to give it that vintage touch. Combine that with a nice 35mm grain and some film dust artifacts, and it all comes together to feel like watching a classic monster movie.