A wild show that kept the Bay Area up all night

Late one night in January 1971, a 9-year-old August Ragone sat in the dark living room of his childhood home on Alabama Street in the Mission District, transfixed by the man on the tiny black-and-white television screen glowing in front of him. 

He had an unassuming presence. Wearing a plain business suit and thick glasses, he puffed at an oversized cigar as he leaned back in a yellow rocking chair, a wry grin on his face. Next to him was a small table adorned by a human skull with a candle jutting out of it. A window shrouded in cobwebs loomed over his head. On the wall behind him was a sign with an unforgettable mantra: “Watch Horror Films, Keep America Strong!”

His name was Bob Wilkins, and he was about to present the Bay Area premiere of “Creature Features” on KTVU’s Channel 2 with a screening of “The Horror of Party Beach,” a wonky ’60s monster movie with a reputation so poor Stephen King once called it “an abysmal little wet fart of a film.”

Ragone, who begged his mother to sit through the film with him, was riveted. There was something about Wilkins’ unexpectedly calming, Bob Ross-like persona, the spooky atmosphere of the set, and the funky theme music that was unlike anything he had experienced before. Even more bewildering was what the host said in a droll monotone during his introduction: “Don’t stay up late, it’s not worth it.”

For the next 14 years, the Bay Area would do exactly the opposite. 

As “Creature Features” exploded in popularity in the regional television market, Wilkins would invite a smorgasbord of special guests and fans to be interviewed on the show. These included Bay Area locals who knitted King Kong-sized sweaters and claimed they were born on Jupiter, and even celebrities like Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher in the early years of their “Star Wars” fame.

“Creature Features” became the Bay Area’s own wacky kind of “Twilight Zone,” not only exposing a generation of young horror fans to classics like “Night of the Living Dead” and “Bride of Frankenstein” for the first time, but also keeping them in the know on “Godzilla” and “Star Trek” conventions in a pre-internet era. Metallica’s Kirk Hammett tuned in every week, George Lucas wrote in fan mail, and the show broadcast from KTVU’s Oakland studios fostered a legacy of sci-fi and horror fandom in the Bay Area that continues to live on to this day.  

“I will never forget it, what it was like to watch that first show,” Ragone, now a writer and film historian, said during a recent conversation over Zoom. “All of the kids in my grammar school were jacked. We were dying to know what we would see next.”  

Wilkins was known as the funny guy at work. The only boy of seven children who grew up in the steel mill town of Hammond, Indiana, he served in the Korean War and later moved to Chicago to come up with ad copy for Burgermeister beer, eventually landing at KCRA Channel 3 in Sacramento by the early ’60s. His job was writing and producing television commercials, but co-workers who liked his wisecracking personality were always asking him to throw luncheons and company parties. The station’s program director, Tom Breen, caught wind of this, and it gave him an idea.

There had been an existing fervor among TV viewers for older horror movies that were being rebroadcast on independent stations and introduced by a quirky emcee. In the Bay Area, that included shows like KRON-TV’s “Nightmare Theater” presented by the fearsome Terrence, the Bay Area’s first horror host, and “Shock Theater” on San Francisco’s KEMO-TV, hosted by the stately Asmodeus. The trend began in Los Angeles with the legendary Vampira on KABC-TV in the late ’50s, while “Elvira’s Movie Macabre” would go on to become one of the most well-known iterations of the phenomenon. Horror hosts became icons of the late-night airwaves, and would often bump up ratings for television stations as they garnered a cult following and provided entertaining context to dated films that viewers otherwise may have deemed too cheesy. 

Breen knew KCRA had its own package of decades-old science fiction and horror films collecting dust in storage and encouraged Wilkins to present them during the empty programming slot after the 11 p.m. news. Wilkins shrugged. What did he have to lose?

But on the night of his first broadcast, a screening of the hallucinatory Japanese sci-fi “Attack of the Mushroom People,” he wondered what in the world he was going to tell his audience. So he picked up the Windsor cigar that helped him calm his nerves, and decided to be honest with them.  

“The show came on at 11 o’clock on Saturday night,” Wilkins told the Chronicle in 1974. “I told whoever was out there, ‘You’re better off going to bed.’ Naturally they stayed up to see if I was right.”

Wilkins’ trademark deadpan deeply resonated with audiences. He pretended to fall asleep while the movies were playing, or showed instant replays of the worst scenes. Sometimes, to the outrage of advertisers, he would read the TV listings aloud to persuade people to watch something else. But the host also presented a unique perspective of fandom and pop culture rarely seen on television at the time. He never framed his guests as geeks or outsiders, but instead sought to understand their interests with genuine curiosity and care.

David Del Valle, an author, historian and film commentator who was attending Encina High School in Sacramento at the time, was a die-hard monster kid. When he discovered “Creature Features,” he remembered being struck by Wilkins. He didn’t wear ghoulish makeup or a wave a cape around. He just seemed like he had stumbled onto the show by accident and decided to stay for a while to see what would happen.

“He was a broadcast guy and atypical for a horror show; he wasn’t a movie buff,” Del Valle said in a recent interview over Zoom. “He was normal. What he was showing wasn’t, but he became the poster child for the horror community because he showed people that we weren’t all demented Renfields running around in our parents’ basements.” 

A self-described precocious teenager, Del Valle had recently joined the Count Dracula Society, an organization that was more about honoring horror celebrities than partaking in occult rituals. But Del Valle decided to sell it and ask Wilkins if he would like him to advertise the group as a guest on the show. Wilkins agreed, and from there, Del Valle began to make regular appearances on “Creature Features” as Wilkins asked him to help pick out some of the films, and invited him to come back on as an expert who could describe their value and importance.

“He could have kept it all laughs and comic relief and never have had any guests that would talk seriously about what was being shown,” said Del Valle. “But he discovered that a lot of the fans were intelligent and articulate and really had points of view.”

After a few years of successful screenings, Breen invited Wilkins to join him at KTVU in Oakland’s Jack London Square, with the promise of bringing the show to a wider audience during the primetime 9 p.m. slot. The station was already famous for the puppet-starring children’s after-school special “Charley and Humphrey” and the daytime game show “Dialing for Dollars,” and while Wilkins didn’t know it yet, he was about to become an instant hit in the East Bay. 

John Stanley, an entertainment writer for Datebook and avid horror fan, had been following Wilkins’ show for years from his home in Pacifica. Though the two had never met, they had been exchanging calls and letters as they discussed the films Wilkins had been covering. When Stanley found out Wilkins was coming to the Bay Area, he was the first to interview him, and just before the premiere of the show, a two-page spread about “Creature Features” appeared in the Sunday pink section. Most of his readers were surprised to see so much of the paper devoted to a relatively unknown TV personality, but his article also revealed an open secret about Wilkins: that he wasn’t even really a fan of horror.

“As he puts it, chomping ever harder on one of his cigars: ‘I wouldn’t walk across the street to see one of those (censored) (censored) (censored) films,’” wrote Stanley.

A friendly collaboration between the two continued as Stanley served as a kind of genre expert for Wilkins, but he wasn’t the only one. The late Bob Shaw, who worked in the film department at KTVU and later became its longtime movie critic, also worked closely with Wilkins, providing him with notes and fun trivia to share each week as the show continued to garner even more of an audience. In 1974, ratings showed that 17% of the Bay Area was watching “Creature Features” every weekend, and the show allegedly beat out “Saturday Night Live” when it premiered a year later. Some of that may have been buoyed by Shaw’s edgier programming choices. 

He noted ratings got a boost whenever they showed something particularly grotesque or shocking, namely the vampire Hammer film “Twins of Evil,” which had scenes featuring full frontal nudity, and the aforementioned “Night of the Living Dead.” As far as Wilkins knew, KTVU was the first station to broadcast the uncut version of the movie, which still has some of the most terrifying kills in horror film history.

“People were calling their friends going, ‘You’ve got to turn on Channel 2. This is incredible,’” Shaw said.

Over time, Wilkins was given the opportunity to speak with a slew of celebrity guests on “Creature Features,” including Buster Crabbe of “Flash Gordon” and Leonard Nimoy, George Takei and William Shatner of “Star Trek.” A small audience started to hang out behind the set — some of them staff from Industrial Light & Magic — and camera people could often be heard laughing off-screen during filming, a detail Wilkins notoriously refused to cut.

“That was part of the charm, too,” said Ragone, who continued to watch “Creature Features” weekly and later appeared on the show as its recurring kaiju film expert. “He was cracking everybody up. I mean, people were hooked on Bob Wilkins.”

Ragone soon started writing letters to Wilkins almost weekly from his Mission District home “like he was Santa Claus,” sharing some of his favorite movies he hoped to see one day on “Creature Features.” He was surprised when Wilkins called him back one day in 1976, inviting him to come on to discuss “Godzilla vs. Megalon,” which was about to be released.  

For the next few years, he’d appear on the show again and again. Wilkins welcomed him with warmth, but also a seriousness he didn’t always get from other adults as a teenager. 

“To him, you weren’t just some blathering kid,” Ragone said. “He treated you like your favorite uncle would treat you.”

When his mother died in a car accident in early 1979, Wilkins became like a surrogate family member to Ragone, taking him under his wing and finding opportunities for him to pursue his interests. He brought Ragone along to conventions and had him sign autographs, and even put the money down to help him kick-start a Godzilla fan club.

“At the time, I felt really lucky, but in hindsight, there was a lot more to it,” Ragone said. “He was really trying to take care of me, I think. And he did similar things to a lot of other people.”

Wilkins frequently highlighted the now-shuttered Cinema Shop on Geary Street, a quirky movie memorabilia store that specialized in many of the same films shown on “Creature Features.” He interviewed fans who built robots from scratch and asked them about their process. He also showcased amateur Bay Area-made films like Ernie Fosselius’ “Hardware Wars,” a spoof on “Star Wars” using kitchen appliances, and the hilarious animated short “Bambi Meets Godzilla.”

“I do believe that Bob, not only by virtue of who he was with his friends, encouraged people to pursue dreams,” his wife, Sally Wilkins, said. “He made that clear on the show. If someone had done a whole movie, he showed it.”

At the height of Wilkins’ career, he had a brief stint as KTVU’s meteorologist, in addition to presenting Friday and Saturday night screenings of “Creature Features” at both KTVU and KCRA in Sacramento, where he returned on weekends. He was also presenting episodes of a new sci-fi focused series called “Captain Cosmic” five days a week. He wrote most of his own material, answered telephones, produced artwork, scheduled guest appearances, and still made time to answer fan mail. Eventually, he felt it was time to retire from television and go back to the advertising business. 

But “Creature Features” wasn’t over yet.

After Wilkins’ announced departure, several people auditioned to be the new host of the show — a tall order to fill, given how popular the former host was. Meanwhile, John Stanley was still working for the Chronicle when he received a call from a publicist at KTVU informing him of the news. He immediately phoned Wilkins, thinking it would make for a great story. 

“I asked him who his replacement was going to be and he said, ‘You, John. You’d be a great host,’” Stanley said. “I almost fell off my barstool, I was so surprised.” 

Still, Wilkins had a point. Stanley had published sci-fi novels like “World War III” and directed the low-budget horror film “Nightmare in Blood,” (some of which was filmed on the set of “Creature Features” and featured a cameo of Wilkins) proving he had the chops to provide a new edge to the show as a dyed-in-the-wool fan. It was Christmas Eve in 1978 when Stanley got another call from the same KTVU publicist: She had overheard two executives talking at a company party, and he had been selected to replace Wilkins.

“I’d never dreamed of being a TV host,” Stanley said. “My life was about to change.”

For the next five years, Stanley would spend Mondays through Thursdays at the Chronicle, and Friday mornings on the set of “Creature Features” at KTVU, which he transformed into a gothic dungeon complete with a skull-topped throne and a coffin his father built himself. He interviewed hundreds of high-profile guests, including Christopher Reeve of “Superman,” horror icon Vincent Price and filmmaker Ridley Scott. Meanwhile, his wife, Erica, became his associate producer and was a “vital force” of the show, working all kinds of behind-the-scenes magic. For one episode, she went to a local butcher shop to buy a lamb heart, which was used as a prop gag when Stanley interviewed “Psycho” author Robert Bloch.

“You still have the heart of a small child, don’t you?” Stanley asked Bloch during their conversation.

“My heart’s in the right place,” Bloch replied, revealing the animal organ in a glass jar. 

On another occasion, she ushered in legendary actor and “Count Dracula” star Christopher Lee, who took one look around at the unusual set and announced that he couldn’t do the show. As he was leaving, he looked up at the monitor above the door and saw Stanley introducing the opening segment of the two-part interview with author Ray Bradbury.

“He said, ‘If it’s good enough for Ray Bradbury, it’s good enough for me,’” Stanley said. “He stayed for the rest of the show.” 

Stanley didn’t try to imitate Wilkins — he didn’t have to. The new host brought a more studious yet slapstick personality to the show, with longer interviews and what he called “mini-movies,” in which he left the studio to film scripted segments with his subjects throughout the Bay Area. He faced off with Chuck Norris in a martial arts studio on Van Ness Avenue, lurked in the shadows with Jack the Ripper at the Wax Museum at Fisherman’s Wharf, and rode in a hearse with actor Angus Scrimm, who played the Tall Man in the Oakland-shot cult classic “Phantasm.”

It wasn’t until the summer of 1984 that the Grim Reaper would finally come for “Creature Features.” A new station manager had arrived at KTVU, and he didn’t like the new era of “Friday the 13th” slasher horror, which he found to be too gruesome. Despite pretty strong ratings and letter-writing campaigns from fans, the station dropped the show, and most of the footage was lost to time.  

During the last episode that September, Wilkins reunited with Stanley to present 1973’s “Lemora, the Lady Dracula.” They popped open a bottle of champagne and toasted to their hard work with more than a hundred other guests, friends, fans, and some guy dressed as Darth Vader. “This is the saddest night since they took ‘Bowling for Dollars’ off Channel 5,” Wilkins remarked.

But in the late ’90s, Bay Area filmmaker and archivist Tom Wyrsch was determined to bring “Creature Features” back from the grave. A longtime fan who grew up watching the show, he tracked down the duo more than a decade later to see if they would be interested in appearing at a live reunion show at the Parkway Theater in Oakland. At the time, Wilkins had gone on to run his own successful ad agency making commercials for clients like Macy’s and Chuck E. Cheese, and Stanley had been teaching classes for older adults through Road Scholar while continuing to publish his own novels and “Creature Features” movie guides. 

“Bob was reluctant,” Wyrsch said over the phone. “He didn’t think people would even care anymore or remember. But it was still so huge in people’s minds.”

The first event in 2000 almost immediately sold out. Wilkins and Stanley arrived in a limo and walked down a red carpet before joining KTVU producer Bob Shaw and host Will “The Thrill” Viharo inside the theater for an interview on a replica of the original set. Wyrsch remembered Wilkins was in awe at the swarming crowd that had gathered for the event. 

“He looked at me and said, ‘Do you think we could do more?’” Wyrsch said. 

Wilkins and Stanley appeared at dozens of other conventions together, in addition to special screenings at the Castro and Balboa theaters. The demand never seemed to wane. “We would go to WonderCon and Bob and John would just have this huge line of people,” Wyrsch said. “People were so thrilled to see them again.” 

During one event at Atlantis Fantasyworld in Santa Cruz, a 16-year-old walked up to Wilkins and asked for his autograph. Wilkins guffawed.

“You’re young,” he said. “How do you know me?” 

The boy told him his father had recently passed away, and talked to him about “Creature Features” and Wilkins all the time. “He said, ‘I just wanted to know who you were,’” Wyrsch said. “People are still watching the show because of what it meant to them when they were kids, and they want to pass that on. It chokes me up every time.”

Wilkins was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2004, but would continue to attend conventions and show his support for the audience for another year. He died at his Sacramento home in 2009 and is survived by his wife, Sally, and two children, Rob and Nancy. 

With the blessing of Wilkins’ family, Wyrsch has taken it upon himself to preserve the legacy of “Creature Features,” producing two documentaries — the aforementioned “Watch Horror Films, Keep America Strong!” and “Up Late with Bob Wilkins,” which was released in 2022 — and a modern iteration of the show on YouTube that has more than 200,000 subscribers tuning in every week.

Decades later, fans are still captivated by the original show. On a recent Sunday afternoon, a raucous crowd packed the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont to watch long-lost footage from “Creature Features,” followed by a Q&A session with Stanley and Wyrsch. People animatedly yelled their favorite quotes back at the screen and asked where their favorite props from the show had ended up (the skull candle was purchased by an Oregon fan for $50, while a coffin on Wilkins’ set is now on display at Time Tunnel Toys in San Jose.) One man’s arms were so full of “Creature Features” DVDs that he nearly dropped them all when he approached Stanley for an autograph. There was a genuine earnestness to their enthusiasm that seemed rare in the modern television landscape, as viewers are inundated by new shows, channels and streaming platforms.

At one point, Stanley shook his head in disbelief. 

“I’m just honored that something like this is still happening,” he said.