For years, local late night weekend television featured horror movie offerings for kids, hosted by cheeseball horror emcee’s usually dressed in capes, coming out of coffins, making strange noises intended to evoke werewolves, monsters etc. There were plenty of junkie horror movies to go around and kids loved this stuff. Because the networks didn’t participate in this brand of niche programming, local stations provided the entertainment with local hosts. And the deeper you went into the heartland and away from the major cities (where real actors actually lived and worked) the crappier the whole affair became. Which brings us to ‘Theater of Thrills’, a local Flynt Michigan offering hosted by ‘Christopher Coffin’. Above are some priceless views of Coffin’s introductions to the late night shows. Wonderfully clumsy, produced on paper mache sets with a minimum of script or even basic preparation, the ‘Theater of Chills’ program was typical of these offerings, one of which must of inspired Joe Flaherty’s ‘Count Floyd’s Monster Chiller Horror Theater’, which was a regular skit performed on SCTV in the early 80s. Flaherty grew up in Pittsburg so he wasn’t directly influenced by Christopher Coffin, but the SCTV take on the genre was perfectly in keeping with the delightfully amateurish vibe of ‘Theater Of Thrills’. For the record (and for obsessive TV history nerds), Coffin was played by a man named Reed Pasternak, a local Flynt D.J. who has no other credits listed on IMDB. Pasternak lived a good long life, descending into his coffin in 2019 at the age of 89.