Turn on any television in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, or New York during summer in the early 1980s, and you were likely to catch a commercial featuring a creepy mime trapped behind an invisible wall, the shadowy figure of a hunchback rounding the corner of a darkened staircase, and a headless woman swatting away the attentions of a handsy mad scientist. The organ sounds of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor played hauntingly in the background, while an amorphously accented voice described a series of horrors. Then…
