
Barry McAlister played this hunchbacked horror host on the Nashville WNAB channel 58. Barry hosted a variety of programs for the better part of two years, until the station eventually made the decision to pull all their local programming.
Barry described his show to me thus:
I did my show for about two years before
they decided to stop doing
any local production at all! The station put the word out that
they were
looking for someone to be host. At the time I had a manager for
my acting
endeavors and she knew right away the opportunity was for me!
I had created
the character of Humphry for a KT Oslin video a few years earlier
and I am
an Improvisational comedian. So I shot a tape at Two Rivers Mansion
and got
the gig!
I was all comedy based and mostly improvised. I had facts and
info.
about the actors, the director and the film, plus other works
the players
had done. But I improvised and did physical bits all around the
information. I never, ever got to see the films ahead of time.
I had a puppet of a small "creature" that I used off
and on. He
spoke in a garbled gibberish only I could understand (I did ventriloquism
with him). Then toward the end I had a puppeteer friend who brought
in with
his rat puppet. There was also a giant rubber spider named Renfield
that
"dropped" in now and then.
The budget was almost nothing, and we shot everything in weird
places. We couldn't use the studio (because they would have to
rent it from
Speer Communications) so we shot in their mechanical room a lot.
We did
cheat and get in a corner of a studio some. But the best stuff
we shot in
Fort Nashborough downtown. There was a giant trap door and everything!
Humphrey the Hunchback quick facts:
Humphrey the Hunchback - "TheWNAB Saturday Night Horror Movie," later called "Frightmare Theater"
WNAB-TV Channel 30 (Nashville, TN)
Movies hosted: "C.H.U.D.", "Jason Goes to Hell", "Piranha", "Halloween II"