Monster Mash book will be a graveyard smash! VIDEO INTERVIEW - Mr. Media Interviews by Bob Andelman

Today's Guest: Mark Voger, the author of Monster Mash: The Creepy, Kooky Monster Craze in America 1957-1972.
 

Watch this exclusive Mr. Media interview with MARK VOGER by clicking on the video player above! 

Mr. Media is recorded live before a studio audience full of werewolves, zombies, vampires and other assorted neighbors of mine… in the NEW new media capital of the world… St. Petersburg, Florida!

1957.

That must have been a helluva year to be alive. I wouldn’t know – my birth was still a few years off.

But coming on the heels of the comic book industry nearly being wiped out by Frederic Wertham’s book Seduction of the Innocent and the subsequent Kefauver hearings in the U.S. Senate, a few in the media still dared to challenge the country to consume something more than pablum:

Monsters!
MARK VOGER podcast excerpt: "I was a Catholic schoolboy and monsters confused me. The nuns and the priests were always beating it into us -- literally, with rulers -- saying, 'We're the one true church! Everybody else is wrong; we're right!' Then I would see a Dracula movie and Peter Cushing would whip out a crucifix. They'd play church music; Dracula would recoil in horror and I thought, as a 6-year-old, 'I guess the nuns are right! We are the one true church because you can't stop Dracula with a gun, but if you whip out a crucifix, he's toast!'"
You can LISTEN to this interview with MARK VOGER, author of Monster Mash: The Creepy, Kooky Monster Craze in America 1957-1972, by clicking the audio player above!

After lying low for several Communist witch hunt years, movie monsters made a big comeback in 1957: I Was a Teenage Werewolf with Michael Landon was first, followed by Curse of Frankenstein the very next week.

Not even TV was safe, as Screen Gems rolled out its “Shock!” package of 52 Universal horror films to independent and hard to find UHF stations.
MARK VOGER podcast excerpt: "Bill Cosby is in the bo