Sunday Horrors (1981-1988, 1990-1995)

Late night horror movie slot on TV, usually just after Radio With Pictures.

This seems to have started 14/6/1981 with Cat People (1942), and aside from summer breaks and occasional nights off due to special screenings the horror slot continued until 11/1/1987 with Nightwing (1979). The following week the time slot was taken by Sunday Science Fiction which only lasted until 18 July of the same year.

On 2/9/1990 TV3's Sunday night late move slot became TV3 Sunday Horrors beginning with Wolfen (1981) but it didn't last long, and then on 29/9/1991 TV2 resurrected The Sunday Horrors with The Thing (1982) and continue until 3/9/1995 with the  Amityville Horror (1979) the last I've found.

Alistair Hughes wrote a trilogy of pieces about the cultural significance of the timeslot:

• School-night of the Living Dead
• School-night of the Living Dead (Reanimated)
• The Return of School-Night of the Living Dead

Thanks to the hard work and generosity of a fellow archival TV researcher we have details of what movies were screened over the years in the slot if you want to host your own Horror night or track down that particular movie that burnt its way into your brain..

The late Sunday night time slot was given over to Sunday Sci-Fi for several months, but after the Sci-fi shelf was bare TV2 ran repeats for a few months until the last week of the year...

Horror seemed to have finally run it's course with TV2 turning to the action and Sci-Fi (again) genres to keep the cult the late night Sunday movie alive.

There were no The Sunday Horrors screenings for all of 1989 as that genre film time-slot was to shift later in the year to late-night Fridays and be labelled The Friday Frights (beginning from 7 April 1989).

Late-night Sunday entertainment was to consist from 1 January to 26 March of a Late Movie time-slot (predominantly black and white films from the 1940s, 50s and 60s), then from 2 April to 1 October was C.V. - a “complete video” music show (similar to the defunct Radio With Pictures), and then from 8 October onwards was The Film Club time-slot screening predominantly Foreign and Arthouse films.

The Film Club time-slot continued through 1990 until 15 April and then on 22 April was replaced by consecutive screenings of the American TV Series Duet, repeats of the UK sketch comedy series Alas Smith and Jones and then the American detective show Dragnet Today.

Then, from September to December 1990, saw the TV3 channel attempt a Sunday night horror film time-slot of their own, with the unoriginal title of TV3’s Sunday Horrors.

The Sunday Horrors returned to TV2 late night Sunday in September 1991.

TV2 The Sunday Horrors (1991 Schedule)

Afterwards the slot became simply The Late Movie

Also of interest is the scheduling, by both SKY Movies and TV3, from the middle of 1991 through to around the beginning of 1993 to create a horror time-slot on Saturdays too (possibly to rival the return of Sunday night horrors on TV2?). SKY Movies began screening horror films, with the time-slot occasionally simply titled Horror, and TV3 created a The Midnight Hour time-slot which played episodes of anthology shows Tales from the Darkside and Monsters, and then when those series had finished it started playing series of Stephen King’s World of Horror and The Secret World (hosted by Christopher Lee).