Danse Macabre (37 page)

And with that hope to guard us against the dreck like a magic talisman, let us go and make our visit. Just close your eyes while we dance through the cathode tube here; it has a bad habit of first hypnotizing and then anesthetizing.

Just ask Harlan.

2

Probably the best horror series ever put on TV was
Thriller
, which ran on NBC from September of 1960 until the summer of 1962—really only two seasons plus reruns. It was a period before television began to face up to an increasing barrage of criticism about its depiction of violence, a barrage that really began with the JFK assassination, grew heavier following the assassinations of RFK and Martin Luther King, and finally caused the medium to dissolve into a sticky syrup of situation comedies—history may record that dramatic television finally gave up the ghost and slid down the tubes with a hearty cry of "Na-noo, na-noo!" The contemporaries of
Thriller
were also weekly bloodbaths; it was the time of
The
Untouchables
, starring Robert Stack as the unflappable Eliot Ness and featuring the gruesome deaths of hoodlums without number (1959-1963) ;
Peter Gunn
(1958-1961) ; and
Cain's
Hundred
(1961-1962), to name just a few. It was TV's violent era. As a result, after a slow first thirteen weeks,
Thriller
was able to become something more than the stock imitation of
Alfred
Hitchcock Presents
that it was apparently meant to be (early episodes dealt with cheating husbands trying to hypnotize their wives into walking over high cliffs, poisoning Aunt Martha to inherit her fortune so that the gambling debts could be paid off, and all that tiresome sort of thing) and took on a tenebrous life of its own. For the brief period of its run between January of 1961 and April of 1962-perhaps fifty-six of its seventy-eight total episodes—it really was one of a kind, and its like was never seen on TV again.

Thriller
was an anthology-format show (as all of the supernaturalterror TV programs which have enjoyed even a modicum of success have been) hosted by Boris Karloff. Karloff had appeared on TV before, shortly after the Universal horror wave of the early to mid-thirties finally ran weakly out in that series of comedies in the late forties. This earlier program, telecast on the fledgling ABC-TV network, had a brief run in the autumn of 1949. It was originally titled
Starring Boris Karloff
, fared no better following a title change to
Mystery
Playhouse Starring Boris Karloff
, and was canceled. In feeling and tone, however, it was startlingly similar to Thriller, which came along eleven years later. Here is the summary of one plot from
Starring Boris Karloff
; it might as well be a
Thriller
episode: An English hangman unduly enjoys his work, which brings him payment of five guineas per hanging. He revels in the snap of the victim's neck, and the dangling arms. When his pregnant wife discovers his true occupation she leaves him. Twenty years later the hangman is called upon to execute a young man, which he does with pleasure, despite the fact that he has secret evidence (of the youth's innocence) . . . . Only then is he confronted by his ex-wife, who tells him he has just hung his own son. Enraged, he strangles his wife and is subsequently sent to the gallows himself. Another hangman collects five golden guineas.*

The plot is kissing cousin to an episode from
Thriller
's second season. In that one, the executioner was French, in charge of the guillotine instead of the gallows, and was presented as a sympathetic character

*From
The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows, 1946—Present
, edited by Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979). P. 586.

(although his work has apparently not affected his appetite; he's a mountain of a man). He is due to execute a particularly foul murderer the next day at dawn. The killer has not given up hope, however; his girl friend has wormed her way into the lonely headsman's affections, and the two of them hope to take advantage of an old loophole in the law (and I should say here that I have no idea if the loophole is a genuine one, like the American concept of double jeopardy, or simply the plot device of Cornell Woolrich, who wrote the story) which holds that if the executioner croaks on the day he is to do business, that day's condemned prisoner walks free.

The lady serves the executioner a huge breakfast laced with strong poison. He eats heartily, as usual, and then sets off for the prison. He's halfway there when the first agonizing pains strike. The rest of the episode is a chilly exercise in suspense as the camera cuts back and forth between the cell of the condemned man and the executioner's agonized walk through the streets of Paris. The executioner, obviously a type-A personality, is determined to do his duty. He reaches the prison, collapses halfway across the courtyard . . . and then begins to crawl toward the guillotine. The prisoner is brought out, dressed in the proper open-collared white shirt (the screenwriter had obviously read his
Tale of Two Cities
) and the two of them converge at the guillotine. Now at the end of his rope (ha-ha), the executioner nevertheless manages to get the screaming prisoner's head in the stock and positioned over the basket before collapsing, stone dead.

The condemned prisoner, on his knees with his butt poking up—looking a bit like a turkey caught in a shakepole fence—begins screaming that he's free! Free, do you hear?

Ah-hah-hah-hah! The doctor who was to pronounce the condemned dead now finds himself called upon to perform that duty upon the erstwhile executioner. He tries for a pulse and finds none—but when he drops the executioner's wrist, it falls on the guillotine's lever. The blade swishes down—
thud
! We fade out, knowing that rough justice has been done. Karloff was sixty-four at the beginning of
Thriller
's two-year run, and not in the best of health; he suffered from a chronically bad back and had to wear weights to stand upright. Some of these infirmities dated back to his original film appearance as Frankenstein's monster in 1932. He no longer starred in all the programs—many of the guest stars on the
Thriller
program were nonentities who went on to become fullfledged nobodies (one of those guest stars, Reggie Nalder, went on to play the vampire Barlow in the CBS-TV film version of
'Salem's Lot
) —but fans will remember a few memorable occasions when he did ("The Strange Door," for instance). The old magic was still there, still intact. Lugosi might have finished his career in misery and poverty, but Karloff, despite a few embarrassments like
Frankenstein
1970, went out as he came in: as a gentleman.

Produced by William Frye,
Thriller
was the first television program to discover the goldmine in those back issues of
Weird Tales
, the memory of which had been kept alive up until then mostly in the hearts of fans, a few quickie paperback anthologies, and, of course, in those limited-edition Arkham House anthologies. One of the most significant things about the
Thriller
series from the standpoint of the horror fan was that it began to depend more and more upon the work of writers who had published in those "shudder pulps" . . . the writers who, in the period of the twenties, thirties, and forties, had begun to guide horror out of the Victorian-Edwardian ghost-story channel it had been in for so long, and toward our modern perception of what the horror story is and what it should do. Robert Bloch was represented by "The Hungry Glass," a story in which the mirrors of an old house harbor a grisly secret; Robert E. Howard's "Pigeons from Hell," one of the finest horror stories of our century, was adapted, and remains the favorite of many who remember
Thriller
with fondness.* Other episodes include "A Wig for Miss DeVore," in which a red wig keeps an actress magically young . . . until the final five minutes of the program, when she loses it-and everything else. Miss DeVore's lined, sunken face; the young man staggering blindly down the stairs of the decaying bayou mansion with a hatchet buried in his head ("Pigeons from Hell"); the fellow who sees the faces of his fellow men and women turned into hideous monstrosities when he puts on a special pair of glasses ("The Cheaters," from another Bloch story)—these may not have constituted fine art, but in
Thriller
's run, we find those qualities above all others by fans of the genre: a literate story coupled with the genuine desire to frighten the viewer into spasms. Years after
Thriller
, a production company associated with NBC—the network upon which
Thriller
was telecast—optioned three stories

*And some say it was the single most frightening story ever done on TV. I would disagree with that. My own nominee for that honor would be the final episode of a little-remembered program called
Bus Stop
(adapted from the William Inge play and film). The series, a straight drama show, was canceled following the furor over an episode starring then rock star Fabian Forte as a psychopathic rapist-the episode was based on a Tom Wicker novel. The final episode, however, deviated wildly into the supernatural, and for me, Robert Bloch's adaptation of his own short story "I Kiss Your Shadow" has never been beaten on TV—and rarely anywhere else—for eerie, mounting horror.

from my 1978 collection,
Night Shift
, and invited me to do the screenplay. One of these stories was a piece called "Strawberry Spring," about a psychopathic Jack-the-Ripper-type killer who is roaming a fogbound college campus. About a month after turning the script in, I got a call from an NBC munchkin at Standards and Practices (read: The Department of Censorship). The knife my killer used to commit his murders had to go, the munchkin said. The killer could stay, but the knife had to go. Knives were too phallic. I suggested we turn the killer into a strangler. The munchkin evinced great enthusiasm. I hung up, feeling like a very brilliant fellow, and turned the stabber into, a strangler. The script was finally coughed out of the network's large and voracious gullet by Standards and Practices, however, strangler and all. Too gruesome and intense was the final verdict.

I guess none of them remembered Patricia Barry in "A Wig for Miss DeVore." 

3

Blackness on the TV screen.

Then there's a picture there—some kind of picture—but it's rolling helplessly at first, then losing horizontal resolution.

Black again, broken by a single wavy white line, oscillating hypnotically. The voice accompanying all this is quiet, reasonable.

"
There it nothing wrong with your TV set. We are controlling transmission, We can control
the vertical. We can control the horizontal. For the next hour we will control all you see and
hear and think. You are watching a drama which reaches from the inner mind to . . . the Outer
Limits
."

Nominally science fiction, more actually a horror program,
The Outer Limits
was, perhaps, after
Thriller
, the best program of its type ever to run on network TV. Purists will scream nonsense and blasphemy; that not even
Thriller
could compete with the immortal
Twilight
Zone
. That
The Twilight Zone
is damn near immortal is something I will not argue with; in big city markets like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco it seems to run eternally, hallelujah, world without end, sandwiched into its own twilight zone just after the late evening news and just before the PTL Club. Perhaps only such ancient sitcoms as
I Love Lucy
and
My Little Margie
can compete with
The Twilight Zone
for that sort of fuzzy, black-and-white, vampiristic life which syndication allows.

But, with a dozen or so notable exceptions,
The Twilight Zone
had very little to do with the sort of horror fiction we're dealing with here. It was a program which specialized in moral tales, many of them smarmy (such as the one where Barry Morse buys a player piano which causes his guests to reveal their true selves; the piano ends up causing him to admit that he is a selfish little sonofabitch) ; many others well meant but simplistic and almost painfully corny (as in the one where the sun does not rise because the atmosphere of human injustice has just gotten too black, folks, too black—the radio announcer gravely reports that things are particularly black over Dallas and Selma, Alabama . . . . Get it, guys? Get it?). Other episodes of
The Twilight Zone
were really little more than sentimental riffs on old supernatural themes: Art Carney discovers he really is Santa Claus after all; the tired commuter (James Daly) finds peace in an idyllic, bucolic little town called Willoughby.

The Twilight Zone
did occasionally strike notes of horror—the best of these vibrate in the back teeth years later—and we will discuss some of these before we finish with the Magic Box. But for sheer hard-edged clarity of concept,
The Twilight Zone
really could not match
The
Outer Limits
, which ran from September of 1963 until January of 1965. The program's executive producer was Leslie Stevens; its line-producer was Joseph Stefano, who wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock's
Psycho
and an eerie little exercise in terror called
Eye of the Cat
a year or two later. Stefano's vision of what the program was about was an extraordinarily clear one. Each episode, he insisted, had to have a "bear"—some sort of monstrous creature that would make an appearance before the station break at the half-hour. In some cases the bear was not harmful in and of itself, but you could bet that before the end of the show, some outside force—usually a villainous mad scientist—would cause it to go on a rampage. My favorite
Outer Limits
"bear" literally came out of the woodwork (in an episode titled, surprisingly enough, "It Came Out of the Woodwork") and was sucked into a housewife's vacuum cleaner, where it began to grow . . . and grow . . . and grow.

Other "bears" included a Welsh coal miner (played by David McCallum) who is given an evolutionary "trip" forward in time some two million years. He comes back with a huge bald head which dwarfs his pallid, sickly looking face, and Lays Waste to the Neighborhood. Harry Guardino was menaced by a huge "ice creature"; the first astronauts on Mars, in an episode written by Jerry Sohl (a science fiction novelist perhaps best known for
Costigan's Needle
), were menaced by a gigantic sand snake. In the pilot episode, "The Galaxy Being," a creature of pure energy is accidentally absorbed into a radio telescope on earth and is finally dispatched by being overfed (shades of that old Richard Carlson meller,
The Magnetic
Monster
!) Harlan Ellison wrote two episodes, "Soldier" and "Demon with a Glass Hand," the latter considered by the editor of
The Science Fiction Encyclopedia
and others to be perhaps the finest episode of the series, which also included many scripts by Stefano and one by a young man named Robert Towne, who would go on to write
Chinatown
. *