Every Saturday afternoon for 22 years, Dr. Paul Bearer plopped down in the “uneasy chair” of his “un-living room” to host a show called “Creature Feature.” On television screens across Tampa Bay, he raised a blocky eyebrow and rattled off the worst puns you’d ever heard in between scenes of the worst movie you’d ever seen.
When he wasn’t the horror host on Channel 44, breaking up screenings of old films with commentary and skits, Dr. Paul Bearer was driving to bingo halls, shopping malls and parades in his 1961 “Cardiac Corpse De Ville” hearse.
He served as the “worst man” at a Halloween wedding. He recruited a “Tampa Tri-bone” reporter to help him judge his annual invisible woman bikini contest.
On Saturdays, he’d be back onscreen to mock another movie and groan his catchphrase: “I’ll be lurking for you.”
Dick Bennick, the man behind the greased hair and gravelly voice, died 30 years ago in Lakeland. Florida’s “massacre of scareimonies” reigned as one of the longest continuous horror hosts in the country, with peers like voluptuous valley girl Elvira and Chicago hippie Svengoolie.
When Bennick’s life ended, so did “Creature Feature.” But the memory of his iconic character has lived oninFlorida’s collective consciousness since, lovingly haunting the fans who miss his ghoulish charm.
Good thing the “bad doctor” has been reincarnated.
Twenty years after Bennick died, Michelle LaRose was approached at an Orlando pop culture convention by a man with wild eyebrows.
Black makeup shadowed his beard and eyes. A severe middle part ran through his slicked hair. The man under the costume was an appliance parts salesman namedRichard Koon. He introduced himself, with a throaty cackle, as Dr. Paul Bearer.
“I did not know who Dr. Paul Bearer was. I’m from Michigan, and we had Sir Graves Ghastly,” said LaRose, who had traveled from St. Petersburg to attend the event with her friend, actor Butch Patrick of “The Munsters.”
“A couple months went by, and I get a friend request on Facebook from Richard, and I’m like, ‘Who is this guy?’” she said. “But I looked at his teeth, and I went, ‘Uh huh. I know who this is.”
She offered to redo Koon’s website. He asked LaRose if she would film him as Dr. Paul. Despite his macabre appearance, LaRose was intrigued.
Like the man behind the first Dr. Paul, Koon is a Winter Haven resident named Richard. He adores anything Halloween, especially toilet-papered yards and the smell of burning pumpkin — specifically, from a real candle inside a jack-o’-lantern.
As a kid, Koon especially loved trick-or-treating at the home of a doctor in his neighborhood.
“He’d always wear this suit and play like he was Dracula, and he’d bite his wife,” remembered Koon, now 57. “She dropped to the floor slowly, and he’d say, ‘Come on in for some candy. Just step over the body.’”
On weekends, Koon’s sister Beth sprinted to the television to turn on “Creature Feature.” He got hooked after seeing Dr. Paul Bearer bop to “Monster Mash” with a headless go-go dancer.
He finally met his idol when he was 13 andvisiting his father at work. Koon’s dad was Bennick’s real-life doctor.
Koon told the actor he looked funny without the Dr. Paul makeup.
“Well, you look funny without yours, too,” Bennick replied.
Decades later, in 2009, Koon attended downtown Winter Haven’s Ghoul’s Night Out festival. At his wife’s suggestion, he dressed as Dr. Paul Bearer.
Koon constructed a replica of Tenement Castle, where the “Creature Feature” segments took place.
“The line to come into the tent went down and around. It was all the way down to the next block,” Koon said. “My sister kept saying, ‘You gotta hurry up! People are waiting.’”
“Is that Dr. Paul Bearer?” parents asked one another as he walked down the street.
One woman grabbed his arm and asked if he was Bennick’s son. She hoped the show was coming back so she could show her children.
“And yeah, my head swelled,” Koon said. “I’m sorry. It swelled a little bit.”
He made a Facebook page for Dr. Paul Bearer, his version, several months later. A friend of a friend who owned a funeral home found him a baby blue Lincoln hearse for $500.
Koon painted it black.
Before Dr. Paul Bearer, there was Count Shockula.
Bennick designed the character in the mid-1960s for aTV show called Shock Theater. Then working at a station in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, he squeezed into a white skull cap and popped in fake teeth. The look, according to author and film historian Ed Tucker, was “kind of like a human skeleton in a tuxedo.”
Bennick quickly realized his character was terrible. And not in a charming, roguish way. Viewers just didn’t care.
“When nobody calls and nobody is talking about you and nobody says anything, you know you’re in trouble,” he told Tucker during an interview in the 1990s.
Bennick decided to kill Count Shockula on air. The murderer would be his replacement: Dr. Paul Bearer.
Bennick owned every issue of “Famous Monsters” magazine, so he flipped through the pages and stole pieces of various characters, Tucker said. Dr. Paul’s beard was inspired by a Vincent Price movie character; the middle part, from a New York horror host namedJohn Zacherle.
“The voice came from the fact that I am not very good on dialects. I was the No. 1 disc jockey at the time in North Carolina and so I thought I should disguise my voice for the character,” he told Tucker. “I stumbled on this reverse falsetto, which is an octave below instead of an octave higher.”
The finishing touch: a scar on his face.
If a child asked Bennick how he got it, he’d say: “From a used scar lot.”
If an adult questioned it? “I tell them, ‘I got it in the war,’ and then they always ask me, ‘Which war?’ and I say, ‘In the boud-oir.’”
Dr. Paul Bearer was a hit for nearly seven years in North Carolina. Bennick brought the character and props with him when he moved to Florida. Every few months, he drove from Winter Haven to St. Petersburg to film “Creature Feature” segments for Channel 44.
“He wasn’t our host,” Tucker said. “He was a person that stopped by your house once a week and you watched a movie together.”
Tucker, 58, spent his childhood Saturdays in Ocala watching as many “Creature Features” as he could.He especially loved the props. Bennick stalked supermarket aisles to find products to parody, painstakingly cutting and gluing together scraps to make boxes of “Chicken McMaggots,” cans of “Bud Frite” and editions of “The Bleeders Digest.”
“To a young kid, he seemed very subversive,” Tucker said.
Sandra Freedman, then the mayor of Tampa, deemed Oct. 30, 1993, Dr. Paul Bearer Day. The proclamation said Bennick “hosted over 1,000 horrible old movies, which have terrorized three generations.”
When Bennick died in February 1995, following open heart surgery in Lakeland, he’d filmed enough new episodes to last through that April. According to the TampaTribune, Bennick’s family didn’t want the station to air them.
Bennick always wanted Dr. Paul Bearer to go national. But when he passed, his show ended too.
In between LaRose’s shifts as a limo driver in St. Petersburg, she directs, films and edits videos of Koon’s Dr. Paul Bearer. A longtime concert photographer, she also shoots promotional photographs and tends to his website and merchandise. Even though they live 90 minutes apart, they talk on the phone every day.
“If I’m not working, when my eyes are open, I’m Dr. Paul-ing it,” she said. “Oh, and I am Dr. Paul-ing it at work too, because when I’m driving, there’s downtime. I’m writing scripts. I’m working on his socials, you know, the LinkedIn and the Facebook.”
When she met Koon in 2015, several years after his Winter Haven debut, he was working with Channel 44 to bring back “Creature Feature.” He filmed eight episodes, but the CBS-owned station struggled to secure rights to classic horror movies from the 1930s through the ‘70s. Koon lost his time slot.
“They wanted to run sports packages, and if they weren’t doing any sports, they wanted to run four hours of ‘Pawn Stars,’” he said.
Koon and LaRose would have to reincarnate Dr. Paul Bearer on their own.
They worked together to film videos and organize public appearances — until the pandemic. LaRose couldn’t quit her limo job, and Koon’s wife didn’t want himto catch COVID-19 and bring it into the house.
Plus, Koon said, “I didn’t think it’d be fun to represent death, even if it was in a comical way.”
As the pandemicfizzled out, Koon tried to film a few TVsegments on his own. It just wasn’t the same without his partner.
“I hated every minute apart,” LaRose said. “We have to be together in order for Dr. Paul to be alive.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com ’
