Above you see this year’s Radio Free Charleston Halloween special, and there’s a short, uninteresting story about how it came to be. “Blood Red Shirt” is chock-full-o good stuff. We have music from Hurl Brickbat, The Renfields with Ari Lehman and HARRAH, plus we a plug for Kanawha Player’s production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (opening Friday) and footage from last weekend’s Zombie Walk. We even have a batch of “weird stuff” that revisits the Pentagram Flowerbox cartoon from our first Halloween special. But our host segments did not come off as originally planned.

I had a really cool, elaborate post-zombie-apocalypse scenario planned, but as our deadlines rushed toward us, it became apparent that, if we were going to get the show done in time for Halloween, we’d have to scrap it and do something simple.

So we did. We brought back an old friend who hadn’t been on RFC since April, 2009. This year’s Halloween show is the return of Radio Free Charleston Horror Theater, hosted by Count Rudolf!

So basically, when I scrapped the zombie thing, I went into the RFC wardrobe department, grabbed the vampire cape and Marvin the wonder pelt, my trusty pet toupee, and headed up to Spring Hill Cemetary to ad-lib the host segments, which were each done in one take.

Kitty Killton, who portrays Celeste The Zombie Supermodel, was under the weather, so asking her to run around in a cemetary on a cold morning while dressed in a garbage bag was out of the question. It’s just me and the camera. Thankfully, Count Floyd, the Patron Saint of Cheesy Horror Hosts, was looking out for us and we got in, did the job and got out without causing a fuss. The segments came out funny and I hope you folks enjoy them.

Luckily, we have a killer line-up of music and other cool stuff this year. We start it off with Hurl Brickbat, recorded at ShockaCon, and their cover of the Doors’ classic, “People Are Strange.” Hurl Brickbat is: Daniel Ferrell (Drums/Vocals), Chuck Keyser (Guitar), Caleb Moore (Bass) and Christopher Carter (Vocals/Acoustic Guitar).We featured them on The RFC MINI SHOW just a few weeks ago, but I saved this tune because it seemed appropriate for our Halloween program.

Kanawha Players is presenting Jeffery Hatcher’s adaptation of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” starting this Friday, and I produced this clip for them to promote the show. The cast did a great job nailing my goofy little script, and the show looks like it’ll be a really great new take, with one actor as Dr. Jekyll and four actors playing different iterations of Mr. Hyde. A trivia note: this was the last piece of the puzzle for this episode of RFC. It was written, shot, edited and posted online within the last 24 hours, as I write this. Check out Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at The LaBelle Theater in South Charleston starting Friday at 7:30 PM.

Our next musical guests present a one-of-a-kind treat and I have to extend huge thanks to Scott Gregg of Razor Sharp Studios and Cucumber & Company who made this possible. During ShockaCon (last months terrific horror/science fiction convention in Charleston), on Saturday, my wife, Melanie Larch and I shot video all day long, and by the time the after hours music began, we were exhausted. As the bands began, our batteries died, both in our cameras and in us. We bailed out, and as a result, we missed The Renfields. But that’s not all we missed, as some very special guests joined the band onstage.

Lucky for us, Scott Gregg was still shooting video and captured the moment when Ari Lehman, the very first Jason from the Friday The 13th horror franchise, joined the Renfields for a stirring rendition of “Machete A Go Go.” You can see Ari walking through the crowd to the stage, carrying a machete, after the song starts. The Renfields were at full force, with all five full-time members joined by Lucio the werewolf, Jamie Lee Renfield, Jason 3-D from The Jasons and Ari freaking Lehman, with everybody waving machetes and singing along. I’m so glad that we’re able to bring it to you for our Halloween show.

Next up is an assortment of varius and sundry weird stuff. Among the three minutes or so of weird stuff is a re-presentation of Pentagram Flowerbox’s “Hell-o-ween,” which we brought you on our very first RFC Halloween special.

It’s been remastered for widescreen and ribbed for her pleasure. You might also see a scary robot baby and toy helicopters or something.

Our headliner for this year’s Halloween show is “Blood Moon” by HARRAH. This is the third year in a row that we’ve featured HARRAH on our Halloween show, and this year we do it with a music video. The song, “Blood Moon” is based on the 1973 horror movie, “Messiah of Evil,” directed by Willard Huyck (with a major uncredited assist from Gloria Katz).

This story of a young woman looking for her missing artist father takes a weird turn when she discovers that the town in which he lives is governed by a cult of cannibalistic maniacs who bleed from the eyes right before they attack.

In the beginning of the clip you’ll hear some snippets of narration from the beginning of the movie, including the quote: “They’re coming here. They’re waiting at the edge of the city. They’re peering around buildings at night, and they’re waiting. They’re waiting for you! And they’ll take you one by one and noone will hear you scream. No one will hear you SCREAM!”

For the video, we took HARRAH’s studio recording of the song and paired it with live performance footage and scenes from the movie. This was done with the aid of Lee Harrah and it is a work in progress.

The band is re-recording the song, and soon we will pair it up with the new version and tweak the editing a bit and bring you the official music video for the song. For now, we hope you enjoy this take on “Blood Moon.”

On our way out of the show we take another look at last week’s Zombie Walk at the Charleston Town Center.

And that wraps up this year’s Radio Free Charleston Horror Theater. We hope you enjoyed it.