Who are you and what
do you do?
My full name is Frank
Wallace-Ailsworth. I'm 52 and was born
and raised here in San Leandro. I'm
married to my wife Chris and have two sons, Gavin, who lives in Boston and is
the drummer for popular art rock band Bent Knee, and Ben, who lives at home and
teaches drums and bass as well as performing all over the Bay Area and
recording with musicians like Jay Lane formerly of Primus.
For the last 6
years I have hosted Horror and Sci-Fi films at various venues all over the Bay
Area. I started at the Chouinard Winery
in Castro Valley in 2009. My wife and I
are close friends with the winemaker, Damian Chouinard, and his family. Damian was interested in showing movies at
the winery, specifically older genre films.
We put a show together with someone else hosting and, though the show
came off well and was well attended, there were some quirks that made Damian
not want to rehire the host.
The next day,
Damian, my wife and I were sitting in my kitchen having a glass of wine when he
said he wanted to do a series of movie shows every September, but didn't want
to use the previous host. I said I
really didn't know of anyone else to suggest, whereupon my wife Chris turned to
me and said "Why the hell don't you do it?"
I had no answer, so the following year in '09 I began
hosting the shows under the title Lord Blood-Rah's Nerve Wrackin' Theatre.
I became Lord
Blood-Rah, the High Lord of Geekdom, (a self proclaimed title): A proud Geek who loves nothing so much as
sharing these great old classic and craptacular horror and sci-fi films with
like minded Geeks.
This last
September marked the sixth year of Lord Blood-Rah's Nerve Wrackin' Theatre at
the Chouinard Winery which runs every September weekend.
Soon after, I
began hosting shows at other venues across the Bay Area including The Bal in
San Leandro, The Parkway in Oakland, The Rheem in Moraga and, most recently,
the Peirano Winery in Lodi.
Three years ago,
I was approached by Sujoy Sarkar of KCTH Comcast 27 out of Chabot College to do
a TV show, basically a Creature Features type horror host show. I dove in and began filming episodes on a set
I built in my home.
Just a few months
later, a good friend of mine in Peoria, Il. Bryan Wolford, who works at WAOE
My59 TV, said their station wanted to run a horror host show and to send a
sample episode for consideration. I met
Bryan while submitting material for his horror themed podcast Drunken
Zombie.
I sent a link to
an episode on Youtube and within a couple of hours I was told they wanted to
run the series! Shortly after, two other
mid-west stations. WISE MyTV Fort Wayne in In. and WHTV My18 in Lansing Mi. picked
up the series.
You can find
episodes of my show, as well as the first appearance of Lord Blood-Rah at the
ever at the Chouinard Winery from 2009 on youtube.com/lordbloodrah.
My connection to
Bryan also lead to me hosting the Drunken Zombie International Film Festival in
Peoria for the last four years. It's an
independent horror film festival that features submissions of short and feature
length horror films from all over the world.
Lord Blood-Rah's
Nerve Wrackin' Theatre is now in it's 5th Season and airs locally on KCTH
Comcast 27 Friday Nights at 10:30pm and Saturday nights at Midnight, and on
Comcast 28 10pm Wednesday nights and 12:30am Saturday Nights as well as the
afore mentioned mid-west stations.
The show can also
be found on various online horror host sites such as Kreepykastle.com and The
Vortexx at horrorhost.net.
I have also made
numerous pop culture and comic book convention appearances and next year will
be the Master of Ceremonies at the 2016 Con-volution Convention at the Hyatt
Regency SFO, as well as presenting a panel on the connection between Tiki
Culture and Monsters at the 2016 Tiki Oasis Convention in San Diego.
This Halloween Night
I'll be hosting the Werewolves of London Halloween Party at Trader Vic's in
Emeryville. We're having a Bay Area's
Best Werewolf Contest with some great prizes supplied by Trader Vic's and
myself!
All this and a
day job make life quite busy!
What do you love
about San Leandro?
As I said, I was
born and raised here. I love the
convenience of living here. Everything
is quite easily accessible and there is a great small town vibe to the town,
even though San Leandro has grown quite a bit since I was a kid here!
Tell me about the BAL?
I did a series of shows at the Bal theatre featuring classic
films. We showed the original
Frankenstein and Dracula there, an evening of Gamera films, Psycho, a tribute
to Creature Features, etc. The shows
were great fun and drew a small, tight attentive audience, but the financial
realities of the Bal at the time, owned by Dan Dillman, made continuing there
impossible. We just were not drawing the
numbers he needed to see to make it viable.
The first
CreaturesCon, the Creature Features convention, was held at the Bal. It was a great success, but even at that
first event we could feel that CreatureCon was outgrowing the venue. CreaturesCon now is a part of the Big Wow
Comic Book Convention which next year will morph into the Silicon Valley
ComicCon.
The Bal looks to
be doing primarily music now. I may
perhaps approach Dan again with a pitch for a show, but with the TV show and
other live shows lined up, it's hard to tell when.
Finishing Words of
Wisdom
To quote the
great Bob Wilkins of Creature Features, "Watch Horror Films, Keep America
Strong!"
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