It’s high noon outside the Citizens Television building on State Street, sunny and warm. Inside, it’s the witching hour, but still, in one or perhaps two senses of the word, hot. Actor and performer Sev Phillips, wearing Rocky Horror drag—black corset, fishnet stockings, stacked heels, makeup and wig—is choreographing a segment for an upcoming episode of Midnight Visitor, talk-singing the lyrics to “Sweet Transvestite” from memory, facing a line of cameras and bright studio lights. He stops to confer with his collaborators, Micky Longcoy and Rex Morris, watching from behind the lenses. “It’s getting a little hot under the wig,” he sing-songs. His co-star in the segment, Midge Morris, encased in a clownish fat suit and holding a giant, potato-shaped headpiece with a sprig of yellow hair on top, commiserates. “There is no ventilation in this suit.”
Midnight Visitor is a ghost- and monster-themed variety show that airs on public access channel 27 (and later, YouTube) whose strangeness is exceeded by its sense of humor. In the typical cold open, Phillips is host Dean Dream, seated amid curtains and candles in silk pajamas and a penciled moustache. He addresses the audience with the airified composure and showy preoccupations of an Old Hollywood diva (“I have got to get Mr. DeMille on the horn!”), and he laces his commentary with vintage creepshow wordplay (“My co-ghost is actually crawling out of his skin to meet you!”). At “co-ghost” the camera cuts to Dustin T. Dust, a small plastic skeleton in the adjacent chair, holding for comment that never comes. The show then proceeds through a field segment with Kenneth Brenda—Phillips sporting a Hawaiian shirt and an outrageous Australianish accent, playing a character he describes as “the world’s worst paranormal investigator”—and lands with piquant melancholy on curated footage from the forgotten corners of 20th-century film history, now scored with atmospheric noise music.
More than a year and seven episodes into its CTV run, the question now is how to up the ante for a Halloween episode of a show that is already extravagantly haunted. “We’re going for scale,” explains Rex Morris. “We gave ourselves more time than we normally take to work on an episode. It has to include more crazy bits.”
The Rocky Horror song and dance number is one “crazy bit” incorporating more crazy bits. A velvet-lined coffin stands in place of Dean Dream’s chair, and a vintage floor-model television set is running footage from the 1958 B-movie classic Hercules (visually milking a line in “Sweet Transvestite” that name-checks Hercules star Steve Reeves). The coffin and the TV are marks Phillips has to hit while the cameras follow. He takes his position in front of the coffin. As he lip-syncs, he jettisons the coffin lid, tosses away the cloak that covers his corset, then stops cold to address the problem of how to introduce his butler—Midge Morris, in costume as Big Buttler.
“Okay, you stand here,” he suggests to Morris, who ambles onto set with the big headpiece on. “So, before we even play it, I’m thinking, we start in my tight [shot]… And then if I can manage, [I sing] You’ve met my faithful hand-y-man with your hand in the shot. Can we see that?” Longcoy at the monitor confirms that Morris’s gnarled puppet hand is indeed visible in the close-up. “And then we go into wide, and I’ll hold your finger,” Phillips says to Morris. “Then you want to move out of the shot?” They pantomime a courtly exit.
With one last dry run to go, Phillips then returns to position, puts the cloak back on and strikes his starting pose, arms folded inside. “Does this reveal too much of my outfit?” “No,” says Morris, having removed the headpiece to have a look. “We’re doing that in the tight [shot] anyway,” Longcoy confirms.
A Rocky Horror homage sprinkled with easter eggs is apt for a show that’s retrospective in its bones, pairing old, weird B-horror footage and a presenter dressed for the occasion. In the ’70s, there was Svengoolie, whose title character was played by Jerry G. Bishop, then Rich Koz, in top hat and skull makeup. In the ’80s, there was Elvira’s Movie Macabre, starring Cassandra Peterson in eye shadow and a slinky, low-cut black dress. Both performed with the aid of simple Halloween props and plenty of puns, and both developed a cult national following. The movies they introduced were from still further back in time, badly made, typically on shoestring budgets, and unintentionally funny; as such, their own introductions and sketches were intentionally low-budget and intentionally funny.
The collaborators behind Midnight Visitor are always likewise figuring out how much of their intentionally low budget to reveal. Longcoy expresses concern that a camera shot, tracking Phillips back to the coffin, will pick up the studio’s brick wall just to the right of the tiny set. Midge Morris shrugs. “A pixel of brick” isn’t a problem. “A mere crumb of brick,” Phillips chimes in. Minutes later, Morris in full Big Buttler costume reenters to clap along while Phillips struts. The clapping meets with everybody’s approval. They both then stop to negotiate the next move. “By this time,” Phillips says, “you need to drop into the chair if you can.” Morris drops, misses the chair, and lands on the accent table, upending props that include a clock and a Victorian doll. Everyone laughs. Longcoy says, “I think if that happens [during the take], that’s fine and perfect.”
The group takes a cigarette break, leaving the building through a service door to get some sun before shooting the segment. When they return, the lights are still hot. Morris wonders aloud if the Big Buttler costume might one day be outfitted with some sort of internal cooling system. Then the cameras roll. This time, “Sweet Transvestite” plays over the studio’s speaker system. Phillips struts and sashays in his corset, Morris in the Big Buttler suit bumbles in and out on cue, and a bearded, waxed, topless Steve Reeves grimaces through the labors of Hercules on the television screen. Each take zooms in on a later part of the movie, and that’s okay. The segment will be edited together from, ultimately, six takes with a just-so disregard for continuity.
Through it all, the line between cast and crew has been continuing to blur. “Part of it is, there’s only four of us,” Rex Morris explains. “And oftentimes three of us need to be doing the technical things. With Midge doing Big Buttler, it’s really shaken up the roles in the studio.” Rex Morris, for instance, fully inhabits every take of “Sweet Transvestite,” crouching behind the coffin to operate a pair of puppets for just two lines, then creeping off set to operate the second camera. In the show’s closing credits, all four are listed multiple times; the fact that they are even credited with making different parts of the Big Buttler costume is itself a joke about the show’s DIY aesthetic.
Segments of Midnight Visitor are likewise stitched together. A theme along the lines of “Aliens” or “Poltergeists” provides some guidance, but the show was otherwise conceived as a place for whatever they could find with the right proportions of unsettling and funny. “Micky was doing a lot of editing of stuff for their old job and a lot of it happens to be like public access footage or found footage stuff,” Phillips explains. “We would watch this show Stairway to Stardom from New York in the ’70s just constantly. And we’re, like, that is high-art public access!”
They have since never stopped looking for footage, finding much of it on the internet. They also eagerly accept new content. “It speaks to the ethos of platforming weird outsider art beyond just our own,” Rex Morris explains. Much of the ambient music is provided by musicians who are fans of the show. And every episode slows to a hypnotic crawl to air the recital of a supernatural encounter, often in the voice of the person who had submitted it to the Midnight Visitor email address in the closing credits. The recountings are paired with hypnotic footage of a spinning reel-to-reel tape machine. Sometimes, Dean Dream is seen listening in on a white corded telephone.
Of the assembled content that makes the 25-odd minutes of an episode, Rex Morris says, “I think it has that kind of flipping-through-channels kind of vibe. Having public access be a thematic element of the show itself. You’re watching TV at 2 a.m. and you don’t know what’s going to come next.”
On set, Phillips in Rocky Horror drag with Hercules behind him embodies that moment of curious dislocation, whether he’s in character or not. After the last take, he consults his collaborators. “How did it feel? Is there anything that we should change for another take? Should we experiment with anything? Am I okay where I am?”
Tune in to CTV as early as tomorrow night (“God willing,” Phillips says) to see what they decided, and tune in tomorrow morning to Daily Nutmeg to go further behind the scenes of Midnight Visitor.
Written and photographed by David Zukowski.
