The art of TV horror hosting is a fine American tradition.
For decades, B-movie aficionados with campy, creepy personas have taken to the airwaves to riff and pun their way through under-seen horror schlock that’s cheap or free to re-broadcast. There were mid-20th-century originators like Vampira and Fright Night’s Sinister Seymour, as well as household names like Elvira of Movie Macabre and modern-day host Joe Bob Briggs. Nashville has its own rich history of home-grown horror hosts, which includes WSIX-Channel 8’s suave Dr. Lucifur in the 1950s and ’60s and WSM-Channel 4’s grotesque and hunched Sir Cecil Creape, played in the 1970s by Nashville native Russ McCown.
Once upon a time, ways to watch a horror movie at home were as limited as escape routes from a vampire's crypt. There were no tapes, no discs,…
And then there’s Dr. Gangrene, a lanky, lab-coated and begoggled mad scientist who’s carried the tradition forward in Music City and beyond for nearly three decades. Before he became a horror host, Gangrene — by day a wholesome and excitable VA hospital employee by the name of Larry Underwood — ran an independent comic book company. But in 1999, inspired by Sir Cecil Creape in particular, he decided to launch a public-access horror-host showcase of his own with Chiller Cinema.
“Definitely Sir Cecil Creape, and wanting to do that kind of show that was around when I was a kid,” Gangrene tells the Scene from his home in Hendersonville when asked about his predecessors. “I didn’t get to watch Sir Cecil Creape. My grandparents and mom, at the time they really wouldn’t let me watch it — strict, conservative Christian household. … It was kind of like forbidden fruit.”
Gangrene did get the opportunity to meet his hero at least one time — he points to the patch he has stitched on his trademark lab coat. “I have a memory of walking up to him, him giving me the patch, and me telling him, ‘I want to do what you do,’” Gangrene says of Creape. “He said, ‘Don’t quit your day job’ or something. … So I don’t know if I’ve made that up in my head over the years, but I did get to meet him.”
Dr. Gangrene at his home studio
Gangrene’s home looks just as you’d likely picture it. A Dirty Harry poster in the hallway. Stacks of B-movie, comic book and Halloween ephemera spilling off of shelves and out of closets. A Gunsmoke rerun plays on the TV while a chubby senior beagle named Copper waddles by. Down the hall is a makeshift studio outfitted to look like a mad scientist’s laboratory — that’s where Gangrene has historically done much of his horror-hosting work.
He kicked off Chiller Cinema on Hendersonville public access nearly 30 years ago with his buddy Chuck Angel. (“He thought it would last about three weeks,” Gangrene admits.) Following the traditional format of hosting campy classic horror movies, Gangrene jumped from network to network a handful of times. After Hendersonville, it was cable access in Nashville for a time, then briefly onto the local UPN affiliate, then the WB (later the CW), before moving back to Nashville on the NECAT network.
Gangrene hasn’t been producing many new episodes recently, though he does host three or four live shows per year, broadcast from the NECAT studio. He also hosts his yearly Horror Hootenanny, an “annual Halloween rock ’n’ roll party,” which had its 19th installment last year at Eastside Bowl. But Gangrene has a good reason for the slowdown in episodes. He’s wrapping a decades-long book project — Masters of Terrormonies: The History of TV Horror Movie Hosts in Nashville is set for release this summer, and will be followed by an accompanying documentary. Gangrene has been researching the book for more than 20 years, he says. At one point he’d walk from his day job at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center next door to Vanderbilt University, where he’d do research in the library.
Before the book drops, Gangrene has a pair of upcoming live NECAT shows on the docket — one in April and another in June. Expect guests, a live studio audience, a horror showcase, a truckload of puns and more opportunities to reach new fans and say hey to the old ones.
“I’ll meet people who tell me, ‘I grew up watching your show,’” Gangrene tells the Scene. “That’s exactly what I wanted when I started it, was that old-school, traditional powerhouse show. That’s what I was aiming for from the get-go. I wasn’t worried about being cutting-edge and edgy and racy or anything. I wanted a traditional, old-school-type show, just like the ones that I grew up with.”
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