Nightmare Theatre - Opening Sequence

Opening Sequence

For most of its run, the late-night program opened with a shot of a mist-shrouded castle (in actuality, a touched-up Addams Family Haunted House Aurora model kit), accompanied by sound effects borrowed from Walt Disney's Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House and music pilfered from Neal Hefti's score for the 1966 Roddy McDowall film Lord Love a Duck. Within its mouldering recesses, the camera settled onto a coffin, which opened to reveal a skeleton. A clever camera fade transformed the bones into The Count, a dime-store Dracula whose shtick was worse than his bite. (A fallible bloodsucker, any attempts to frighten his younger viewers would be undermined by such antics as slamming his fingers beneath his coffin lid.) Armed with a battery of bad puns and a mock Transylvanian accent, The Count would introduce double-features that usually consisted of low-budget horror and science-fiction fare, although occasionally it would be padded out by poverty-row thrillers from the 1930s and 1940s. During its leaner years, only a single film was aired, usually a tiring re-run which regular fans had already seen far too many times. KIRO-TV had one of the largest libraries of old films at its disposal, including all of the classic Universal monster movies, which they showed with some regularity.