Lori Falce: Chilly Billy and the real Hollywood scare

For some kids, their childhood heroes were sports figures. For others, they might be actors or pop stars.

For me? Well, mine was a local television host. I couldn’t get enough of Bill “Chilly Billy” Cardille.

His Saturday night film fest on WPXI wasn’t the beginning of my love affair with horror movies. My mother loved “Them” with its radioactive giant ants. We spent many nights with a bowl of popcorn and a spooky ghost story.

But Cardille’s “Chiller Theater” introduced me to the campy fun of being scared. The moment I recognized him in “Night of the Living Dead” was a landmark for me. My best friend and I spent so many weekend sleepovers gleefully terrified of the zombies and vampires Cardille ushered into the tiny TV in my bedroom.

I was crushed when “Chiller Theater” ended its run in 1984. I was elated when I heard a new version will come back starting Saturday and running through Oct. 28. I hope it brings a whole new crop of film lovers to discover scary movies.

However, local efforts like this have an opportunity to do more. They can support the arts in their community.

You can’t talk about Cardille’s career without talking about zombie mastermind George Romero. You can’t mention him without nodding to special effects wizard Tom Savini. Pittsburgh was an incubator for a special variety of horror movie that has hugely influenced today’s filmmakers, and Cardille was a part of that.

With the Screen Actors Guild and Writers Guild of America on strike, it might seem that Hollywood is shut down. In reality, the impact is felt everyplace that movies and television are made, including Southwestern Pennsylvania. Actors, directors, writers, designers and production staff do not work just in Los Angeles.

When we support local production right now, we find ways to express our appreciation of this work. We tell studios that we want to see more movies and television. The people who make that happen might be our neighbors who live here year round. They might be visitors who come in for a particular production. We appreciate them all.

The writers strike began May 2. The actors strike followed July 14. That is months of a blackout on work that impacts our communities and economies.

We can take this time to support local theater and traveling companies. We can watch local television production — and hey, we make videos at newspapers now, too. (We even won Emmys for it at TribLIVE.)

And while new movies aren’t being made, we can watch the ones that were already made and realize that one of the scariest parts is how little the real people who made it happen got paid. Sorry, Chilly Billy, but you never gave me that kind of fright.