Head Back to Halloween 1984 With These VHS Uploads of Vincent Price and Elvira Halloween Specials

UPDATE: It appears that after generating a huge amount of online attention, the Internet Archive collection that featured these Halloween specials has since been removed.

I recently came across a piece that Vanyaland did as part of its “Quarantainment” series about an Internet Archive user who recently uploaded their entire ’80s MTV VHS recordings to the site. The collection is made up of 459 files and features hours upon hours of raw MTV footage from 1981 through 1989. While it was cool to see things like the first four hours of MTV for nostalgia purposes, I was more excited to uncover some classic Halloween programming featuring two of my favorite Halloween icons Vincent Price and Elvira Mistress of the Dark.

Both videos were captured during the 1984 Halloween season, with the first being Vincent Price’s “Halloween Thriller.” Outtakes from the special have surfaced online over the years, but I’ve never seen the entire broadcast available online until now. The hour-long syndicated special aired on October 27, 1984 and featured Price playing host to a mix of “Halloween” music videos, including Halloween playlist staples like ‘Time Warp” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me,” Ray Parker Jr.’s “Ghostbusters,” and Ozzy Osbourne’s “Bark at the Moon.” The special also features two performances from illusionist Abb Dixon, who performs a “cremation” and “the table of death.”

For Elvira fans, the uploaded collection also includes the Mistress of the Dark’s first MTV Halloween special from Halloween night 1984. The upload features the entire five hour long broadcast where Elvira plays guest VJ and turns MTV into Macabre TV.

The special featured a number of sketches from the Mistress of the Dark as well as guest appearances from John Carradine, Cheech Marin, and “The Breather,” a reoccurring character from “Elvira’s Movie Macabre,” played by John Paragon. The special also featured a number of clips from the B-grade horror movies that made the Elvira character famous.

Elvira’s shenanigans are sandwiched between 30-minute blocks of Halloween themed music videos with the special concluding with a presentation of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.

For being VHS transfers, the quality of both videos is actually pretty decent and in many instances still have the commercials intact for some added nostalgia.

You can access the entire library of uploaded MTV VHS tapes on the Internet Archive here. Or you can go straight to Vincent Price’s Halloween Thriller special here, or Elvira’s Halloween Special here. As a note, you do need to have a free Internet Archive account to access the videos, but trust me, it’s worth it.