The cool thing is that in the age of digital broadcast television, every station gets a handful of additional channels, and they stock these with a host of channels very reminiscent of the old local UHF stations that played reruns and syndicated shows.
My favorite is MeTV and not just for their Saturday morning cartoons. They also have a great Saturday evening lineup* that kicks off with Svengoolie, a classic b-grade monster movie show with a cheesy host character.
Last night they showed the original Friday the 13th, which I hadn't seen since it was still fairly new.
I was in eighth grade, spending the weekend at a friend's house playing Dungeons & Dragons (Module B2, if you must know), and my friend had an older sister who was so cool because she was in college and drove a late '70s Firebird, and she asked us "Hey, do y'all wanna see a scary movie?" and of course we said yes, so we watched the camp counselors at Crystal Lake get massacreed on HBO.
Friends, it scared the pee out of younger me. Like, nightmares and stuff. Put me clean off horror movies... especially of the slasher genre ...for the next decade.
Looking back now, no wonder Stranger Things was right in my wheelhouse.
Funnily enough, that salaciously scary movie I watched in '81 or '82 took surprisingly little editing to be okay for broadcast TV in 2026. They blurred some boobies and might have cut some dialog, but it looked like most all of the gruesome stuff was still there.
Also, it really wasn't scary at all. I didn't jump at the jump scares and the slasher stuff wasn't very gross by modern standards. It was all kinda cheesy in fact. Ah, well.
*After Svengoolie, you get the Adam West Batman, Star Trek (TOS), and Adventures of Superman. If you're a night owl, those are followed up by Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
