DR. SARCOFIGUY
PRESCRIBES HORROR MOVIES
Host of cable TV show to present 12-hour Halloween treat
By CHRIS SCHNEIDMILLER
Northern Virginia Journal
In the movie "White Zombie," evil sugar mill owner
Murder Legendre
uses his powers of zombification to enslave unlucky Haitians
and
terrorize island visitors and inhabitants alike with his undead
minions.
It's sick. It's wrong. It's ...
"Chahhhming."
You can't hear it here, but that two-syllable word has been
delivered
in a Southern accent only slightly less thick than Foghorn
Leghon's.
And the man with the drawl is Dr.
Sarcofiguy, Fairfax County's
own
Ph.D of terror.
Sarcofiguy can be seen each week hosting "The Spooky
Movie," a
late-night cavalcade of horrifying--and sometimes
horrible--movies in
the public domain. He'll don his customary white lab coat and
dark
sunglasses again Thursday for a 12-hour Halloween movie
marathon on Falls Church Community Television Channel 12. |
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The
Northern Virginia Journal (10-29-02); photo by Brig
Cabe |
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"Viewers will see basically back-to-back ridiculousness
through the
whole thing " said Sarcofiguy, sometimes known as
36-year-old writer,
artist, stand-up comedian and singer John Dimes, of Washington
DC.
The doctor is a spiritual descendent of decades-worth of hosts
like
Elvira and D.C.'s own Count Gore De Vol, but with his own
twist. He's
the first and possibly only black host of a TV horror-movie
show. And
he's more given to hearty laughter than evil cackling--think of
a
slightly macabre teddy bear--but still deranged enough to
inflict
"Santa Claus Conquerors The Martians" on viewers.
The show's 47th episode will be included twice in the Halloween
marathon, along with four classic shows. lf past episodes are
an
indicator, viewers can expect humor, rampant ad-libbing and
occasional confusion.
"What're we doing? We're talking about? This is it. What
is it? What
it it? What're we doing?" asked the doctor, a bit
flummoxed in the
first minutes of a recent episode.
"Welcome to Spooky Movie," prodded
C. W. Prather, the shows
producer and co-creator, from behind the video camera.
"Oh, that's what we're doing."
The night's film was 1932's "White Zombie," in which
BeIa Lugosi and
his eyebrows perpetrate great evil upon an unsuspecting
populace.
After zombifying nearly every person in sight, Lugosi is
knocked on
the head, his pasty followers all stumble off a cliff and the
bad guy
fatally follows suit.
Before, during and after the movie, viewers were treated to
videotaped
scenes of Sarcofiguy's appearance in the 2002 Falls Church
Memorial Day parade.
The doctor rolled through town in the back of a convertible,
calling
out to the crowd and swinging a rubber third hand. The hand was
the
butt of several bad jokes shared by Sarcofiguy and
parade-goers.
Citizen: "Give me a hand over here!"
Sarcofiguy: "Everybody things they're a comedian." |
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Along the way, Sarcofiguy even passed by some fans:
"Doctor!" "Dr. Sarcofiguy! Hello!"
The doctor has been building his fan base since first appearing
in
1995, but his inspiration goes back to Dimes' and Prather's
childhoods
as horror-loving youths and fans of Count Gore De Vo's
"Creature
Feature" on WDCA-TV Channel 20. Prather even dressed up in
fourth
grade as a vampire--his monster of choice--and sent a
photograph to
the Count.
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"The Count on Sesame Street. Count Chocula. It was an
obsession
through my school years," said Prather, who grew up to be
a Webmaster and film producer.
A good scare flick could be anything from the children's
classic
"Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory"--whose poorly
behaved and
subsequently punished youngsters have freaked out kids for
years--to
schlock like "The Screaming Skull," which offered
viewers a free burial should they be frightened to death by the
movie.
|
Dimes said his first fright film was "Friday the 13th,
Part II," which
left him "in a puddle on the floor." But his love for
the movies stuck--he only half-jockingly estimates having seen all
horror films and owns upward of 200 on videotape.
"[It's like a] roller coaster without actually being on
the roller coaster," Dimes said. "Your heart is
racing."
Dimes and Prather met in 1989, introduced by a mutual friend
who knew
both were writing novels about vampires. They became friends
and Dimes began to appear in works Prather produced for the Falls
Church cable access station.
In 1995, Dimes hosted Prather's "Tales To Make You Say,
'Goodness!,'" a 12-part variety series of home videos and
taped segments. Looking to do something a bit different for the
October episode, the duo unleashed the doctor and his
"cornpone" accent on the world.
After briefly considering becoming Arab/Irish horror host, Kareem
O'Torium, Dimes settled on the nom de plume Sarcofiguy, a
simple play on sarcophagus, for the host.
"All I remember is I was sitting and talking about
something,' Dimes
said.
"The second he did it, we both knew that was it,"
Prather said of the
accent.
The first episode of "The Spooky Movie" appeared only
a couple weeks afterward.
The doctor is a psychiatrist at a mental institution in
"Hope Valley,
U.SA." He joins a proud medical legacy among horror hosts,
he who
include Drs. Creep, Destruction, Frank N. Albertstein, Fear,
Freak,
Gangrene, More B.S. and Zombie, to name a
few. |
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The
Sunday Journal / Gazette (10-27-02); photo by Brig
Cabe |
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Where most horror hosts might while the hours away with fellow
ghouls,
Sarcofiguy's fiends include fellow boarding house resident and
renowned poet Maya Angelou and "fabulously successful vampire author" Anne Rice. Or at least reasonable facsimiles
thereof.
Rice--actually stand-in Mark Blackmon--provided a highlight for
the
2001 Christmas special, with her poem "Twas the Bite
Before Christmas."
"When what to my wondering eyes should see but a miniature
actor, only 5-foot-3," she said. "He smelled like blood
and a bit of booze, and I knew in a moment it must be Tom
Cruise."
The show other wise maintained Sarcofiguy's fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants ethos. He opened the show with a discussion of
how to open the show, then joined compadre Dr. Bombay--also played
by Blackmon--in a conversation that careened wildly from P. Diddy
to Tweety Bird to Mickey Rooney.
"We're lucky if we remember the title of the featured
movie," Prather
said. "That has been sort of the running joke with Dr.
Sarcofiguy,
that he doesn't watch his own movies."
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Shows are televised at 9 and II p.m. each Friday and last 75
minutes
to two hours, depending on the length of the feature film.
"There's a
few short ones. A few giant bug movies from the '50s," Prather said.
Movies in the public domain, which are free from copyright and
available for use by anyone, can be identified through the
Internet or
the Library of Congress, Prather said. Then it's just a matter
of finding a copy of the film.
Some are actual classics--the first "Spooky Movie' episode
offered
George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead."
Conversely, combining Old
Saint Nick and extraterrestrials in any film should be a
punchable
offense.
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In making "Spooky Movie," Dimes and Prather have
become part of a
nationwide collective known as the Horror Host
Underground.
Prather joined Count Gore's e-mail list at www.countgore.com
in 1999.
Hosts and would-be hosts made contact through the mailing list,
and
soon began trading tapes and filming greetings.
Prather developed and maintained a Web site for the group,
www.tvhorrorhosts.com,
which lists 35 hosts, from A. Ghastlee Ghoul to
Zomboo.
Hosts "self-syndicate" by televising tapes of their colleague's
shows
along with their own on public access channels across the
country.
Channel 12 airs a six- hour block of horror hosts each
Saturday, and
Sarcofiguy is seen on cable channels in North Carolina, New
Jersey,
Ohio, Illinois and soon in California.
Horror hosting even has allowed Prather and Dimes to meet Count
Gore and establish a friendship built on mutual respect. Prather
has worked on the Count's Web site; Sarcofiguy taped a message for
his millennium special and provides movie reviews for the
site.
"I try to be calm about it, because he's just a guy, but
he's my hero," Dimes said.
"The guy's nuts," said Count Gore, who now lives near
Chicago under
the name Dick Dyszel. "I can't emphasize enough what a
wonderful job
[Prather] has done and how creative Dr. Sarcofiguy is," he
added.
The show's future remains open-ended. Prather said he wants to
produce at least 50 episodes. Big changes could be on the way--new
characters, a sitcom, and maybe even an arch-foe for the
doctor.
Viewers might also look for another live episode and Christmas
special, and even some non- "Spooky Movie"-related
shows from
the duo.
"We've got too many ideas right now," Prather said.
(C)
The Northern Virginia Journal, 2002
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