Remembering Jerry Harrell (Doctor Madblood)

In the Fall of 2004, I was 25 years old and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I’d worked for about three years at a pair of TV production companies in the Hampton Roads area. I’d published my first book and was starting to research my second. Feeling secure, I bought a condo in Virginia Beach. Then I lost my job. Suddenly, I had a mortgage and no job prospects. If I wanted to keep working in television, I knew I needed to move to New York or Los Angeles. But I wasn’t ready.

For a few months, I was flailing. Honestly, I wasn’t so much looking for a job as I was looking for someone who could help me figure out who I was. One of the people I sought out was Jerry Harrell, a.k.a. Dr. Madblood. Jerry first donned the wig and persona of the late-night TV horror host back in 1975, when he about 27 years old. When I met him, he had been doing his schtick for nearly 30 years. As a horror nerd, I found that incredibly inspiring, so I requested a meeting with him at his office at ODU, where he worked as a media manager. We ended up talking for over an hour.

I had recently met filmmaker George Romero, and I remember telling Jerry about that encounter. His eyes lit up, and he told me about meeting two of his heroes, Rod Serling and Forry Ackerman. We talked about the Madblood show, of course, which he described as a family affair. I remember he told me that the main reason he was still doing it was because he couldn’t bear to disband such an amazing team. He also said the show fulfilled his mission in life: “to tell people that it’s okay to be weird.” At the end of our conversation, he invited me to the taping of the next episode.

A few days later, I was watching the cast and crew at work in a small studio at ODU. And I was in awe. I’d had enough experience with TV production to know that it’s not all fun and games… but the taping of Dr. Madblood Presents was all fun and games. There was a lot of improvisation, a lot of laughter, and a lot of love. To me, it seemed like the ideal working environment. At the end of the night, Jerry’s cohorts Craig T. Adams and Debra Burrell invited me to come back the following week. I didn’t want to impose, but I didn’t say no. 

Around the same time, I attended the inaugural MonsterFest at Chesapeake Library, where Dr. Madblood was the guest of honor. Someone (maybe head librarian Jim Blanton?) reminded told him that I had recently published a book about horror movies, and Jerry immediately suggested using my book in a segment he was recording that day. Fool that I am, I did not have a copy of my own book, so I didn’t get the free press. But I was tremendously grateful that Jerry wanted to support me in that way. 

Over the following months, I kept going to the taping sessions for Dr. Madblood Presents. Craig and Debra put me to work, rolling Brain’s fish-tank in and out of shots. I believe I was even credited as “Brain-wrangler” on a few episodes. Those sessions helped me to escape—for a few hours, at least—my overwhelming sense of inertia in life. I didn’t know where I was headed or what I wanted to do, but for the time being I knew I was among friends. That made a big difference.

In the Spring of 2005, things turned around. I got a new production job—on a TV series about paranormal experiences, which was right up my alley. I also met my future wife. We took a field trip to scout the real “Madblood Manor” in downtown Portsmouth, as a potential filming location for the paranormal series. That was my idea, of course—I wanted to pay homage to my friends—and that’s how Madblood Manor appeared in Season 1, Episode 6 of the Discovery Channel series A Haunting.

When my time on A Haunting ended, I was feeling confident again, so I immediately wrote a spec script for a horror film. In the pre-credit sequence of my story, a character  watches Dr. Madblood on late-night TV. I ended my scene with one of the doc’s famous pronouncements: “This one is going to be a real ker-schtinker!” Was I jinxing my own script? Nah. Coming from Dr. Madblood, I knew that would be a badge of honor. 

I also tried to write an episode of Dr. Madblood Presents. I knew it would never get produced, but I’m a writer so I couldn’t help myself. Since a few of the episodes had spoofed old sci-fi / horror movies, I decided to spoof a new one. My episode was titled “Donnie Day-Glo.” By then, I’d read Craig Adams’s (woefully-unpublished) Madblood memoir, and had also seen some of the early episodes from the 1970s, so I had a sense that the original incarnation of the show was a bit more…. trippy, shall we say? (The doctor’s famous sign-off phrase—“Thanks for turning us on!”—obviously had a double meaning in the 70s.) Anyway, the humor in my script didn’t mesh with the more family-friendly incarnation of the show in the early 2000s. Also, I failed to capture the distinctive voice(s) and humor of the show. I was too much in my own head. Still, I loved the idea of writing for those characters, and being part of that world.

In the Fall of 2006, my wife and I moved to Los Angeles, where we spent the next fifteen years. Every Halloween, I would watch the Madblood Halloween special online, and post comments in the WHRO website’s chat room. I was always grateful for the opportunity to spend time with my old friends, even though I was on the other side of the country. In 2009, I returned to Virginia for a MonsterFest screening of my documentary film Nightmares in Red, White and Blue. This time, I was ready for my close-up with Dr. Madblood. Jerry couldn’t have been kinder. He treated me like a pro. More importantly, he treated me like a friend.

In the Fall of 2025, Jerry Harrell took his final bow in the (original?) Madblood wig and lab coat for a 50th anniversary Halloween special. That’s 50 years of telling people it’s okay to be weird! The message resonates more strongly today than ever—which is why Jerry will be dearly remembered and missed. I don’t think he would have wanted anyone to exaggerate the importance of his life or work, so I won’t exaggerate. Jerry Harrell was a beacon of light, for me and for so many others. He provided countless laughs and inspiration and refuge and family. All of those things will outlive him. For that, we will be eternally grateful.

Thank you, Doc, for turning us on.

Book Review: Monsters in the Archives (Caroline Bicks)

One of the most exciting things I did in 2025 was visit the new Stephen E. King Archive in Bangor, Maine. For three days, I holed up in an annex to the former King family home and read rare manuscripts by and about one of my favorite authors. The only bad part of the experience was leaving with the feeling that I had barely skimmed the surface.

That’s why I was excited to read Caroline Bicks’s book Monsters in the Archives. Bicks is a Shakespeare scholar who spent an entire year in the King Archive, studying manuscripts for five of King’s earliest (and most famous) books: Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Night Shift, and Pet Sematary. Her book—which is mostly a literary analysis, with minor detours into memoir and journalistic interviewing—is a strong reminder of King’s love of language and his commitment to humanistic storytelling.

Bicks starts with Pet Sematary and works her way backward to the earlier manuscripts. Echoing the author’s memoir On Writing, the early section of Monsters in the Archives is a chatty “elements of style” guide, emphasizing King’s often-unacknowledged discipline as a wordsmith. Almost nobody (Bev Vincent excepted) thinks of Stephen King as a poet, but Bicks draws attention to word associations, rhythms and “aural effects” that give his work a “multi-sensory heft.” 

Bicks also highlights revisions that made Pet Sematary more horrific by making the supernatural more ambiguous and the central characters more empathetic. King has said that the secret to telling an effective scary story is creating characters that readers care about. Monsters in the Archives goes on to illustrate this point with in-depth analyses of The Shining, ‘Salem’s Lot and Carrie. 

I think of the ending of The Shining as the moment when Stephen King became “Stephen King” (America’s favorite boogeyman)—because he tempered the darkness of his story with just enough light and hope to win over a mainstream audience. While writing the novel, King once said, he assumed the entire Torrance family would die at the end—but, when he got there, he just couldn’t do it. Bicks shows that this anecdote is only partly true. In an early draft, King went there. When he revised the novel, however, he made a conscious decision to tell a different ending.

Going even further back, from The Shining to Carrie, Stephen King’s manuscript revisions are even more substantial, showing how the author honed not just his voice but a personal philosophy. King the short story writer (the voice behind the Night Shift stories) is more of a nihilist… and Carrie started as a short story. In interviews over the years, King has said that the original ending of Carrie was inspired by a 1950s B-movie called The Brain from Planet Arous. This always suggested to my mind a less accessible if not downright ludicrous third act. Bicks confirms the assumption—and shows how King’s extensive revisions over the course of multiple drafts put a greater emphasis on Carrie’s inner life, giving readers a telepathic connection to her, and also building a bridge of trust between the author and his Constant Readers. What’s on display here is the evolution of an artist.

Bicks says Monsters is also a book “about a grown-up English professor facing her childhood fears and getting to know the man whose monsters helped unleash them.” Although the author kicks off her confessional B-story with an account of a genuinely creepy childhood paranormal experience, her digressions into memoir sometimes feel a bit forced to me. She is nervous to be on King’s hallowed ground and I’m not sure why. I too have made pilgrimages to real-world locations associated with King’s stories but I have never felt unnerved by those experiences, only awed. The trips provided validation that King’s imaginary world isn’t entirely made up—and, for me, that’s a good thing. It doesn’t conjure fear; it connects me to the work and the mind behind the work. Bicks’s shared journey into the archives does the same thing, and for that I’m grateful. In the age of AI, this sort of deep dive into the inner life of an artist is more inspiring than ever. 

I can relate to Bicks when she writes about bearing “an unflattering resemblance” to Jack Torrance as he obsesses over the Overlook’s historical scrapbooks. Writing a book like Monsters in the Archives requires falling down the rabbit hole, becoming obsessed. When I was writing a biography of T.S. Eliot, I was constantly making connections between the poet’s words and my everyday world. When I was writing The Soul of Wes Craven, I saw connections to the filmmaker everywhere. 

I used to go for a daily walk in the woods behind my house. When I entered the woods, the same hawk would swoop down, perch on a branch, and watch me. Wes Craven was a birder with a particular love of predatory hawks. I’m not saying I thought the hawk was Wes, or sent by Wes… but the human brain is hard-wired to make connections, and when we delve deeply into another human’s brain, there is a kind of communion that might be compared to telepathy. I don’t necessarily think this is a supernatural phenomenon…. but…. What if? Every good horror story starts with this question. Bicks writes, “What if manuscripts can absorb or store more than just inks and words? What if their pages can pass on dark energy along with their stories?” Or.... light energy?

I can’t escape the thought that stories transcend and transforms reality as we know it, because I believe our world runs on stories—and on our belief in certain stories. Everything we think we know is really a story that has been told to us, or that we’ve told ourselves. Religion is story. Politics is story. Our history—individual and collective—is story. If you believe that, then it becomes pretty damn amazing to sit in an archive and hold an original manuscript of a story that has affected hundreds of thousands of lives and (literally) changed the world we inhabit. We writers love this stuff: physical artifacts of half-imagined civilizations. Stone tapes in a digital world. 

I share Caroline Bicks’s emotional attachment to the mass market paperbacks of King’s classic novels, the ones she read when she was growing up. Why? Because they’re part of my personal history, my story—and therefore very real to me. These are not just artifacts of a bygone civilization; these are sacred scrolls. Too much? Look at it like this: With the written word, readers become co-creators in a way that we don’t with visual media. We make imaginative leaps to fill in the details. Stephen King gets this; that’s why he leaves gaps. Caroline Bicks gets it too; her book points out those gaps, as well as the author’s intentions, and she makes us aware of our own private collaborations with King. We, Constant Readers, have our own monsters in the archive.

I read this book obsessively and finished it in two sittings. It left me wanting to revisit the early Stephen King novels, and King’s work in general. I think that’s the most rewarding effect that a book like this can have on a reader—making us more aware of the human beings behind our favorite stories: the author and ourselves. Bravo, Bicks.

Monsters in the Archives will be available from all the places on April 21, 2026.