The Scare Salon

Before I embark on the long trek into season two of Thriller with Boris Karloff, I’m going to take that promised side journey into Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, the pilot episode of which I discussed here. You see, just this past weekend while I was out and about, I happened upon a complete box set of all three seasons, priced very reasonably, so I bought it and started watching, thinking the universe likely wanted me to get started sooner rather than later. Never let it be said that I don’t do what the universe requests, within certain parameters.

I wasn’t sure how many episodes I was going to talk about per post (since I’ve usually been doing six at a time for Thriller), but then I figured I would just talk about the entirety of season one, since I managed to watch all six episodes over a few successive nights, which comprised a total of 17 stories. Onward and upward.

Episode 1
“The Dead Man”

Probably my favorite of all the episodes I’ve watched so far because it’s the most macabre, “The Dead Man” is based on a short story by famed horror and fantasy writer Fritz Leiber, though it gave me definite vibes of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” as well. It was directed by Douglas Heyes, who I’ve brought up several times over in my Thriller breakdowns, as he helmed a bunch of those. Incidentally, I thought I’d mention again that he also directed the movie Kitten with a Whip, starring Ann-Margret and John Forsythe, which was featured on MST3K.

Anyway, the story starts out with one doctor, Miles Talmadge (played by Jeff Corey, who directed a segment from an episode I’ll be discussing shortly) coming to visit another one, Max Redford (Carl Betz) at his swanky mansion/experimental medical facility. Dr. Talmadge wonders where all of Dr. Redford’s other patients went, and Redford says he’s only working with one these days, but man, is that one patient a doozy.

The patient, it turns out, is this bronze-skinned, golden-haired youth named John Fearing (played by Michael Blodgett, who I recognized from another MST3K classic, Catalina Caper, though he was also in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls). Fearing is lying on a gurney in Dr. Redford’s lab when Dr. Talmadge arrives, looking a tad sickly and presumably unconscious or sedated. Smirking, Dr. Redford asks Dr. Talmadge to diagnose his patient’s condition. Talmadge makes his best guess, Redford goes NOPE, still smirking, and when Talmadge turns around to look at the patient again, the man appears completely healthy.

Redford fucks with his colleague a few more times like this, with Fearing seemingly manifesting completely different diseases at the drop of a hat, and then Fearing gets up from the gurney, totally fine, and swans out of the room to get dressed for dinner. Redford then informs a mystified Talmadge that he (Redford) has been able to essentially hypnotize Fearing—who is genetically predisposed to this specific thing—into physically exhibiting the symptoms of any disease that’s suggested to him, a breakthrough which could have tremendous medical significance.

So certain is Redford that this finding is going to change the world and make his reputation that he will do anything to hang on to his prize patient…including letting Fearing bang Redford’s wife, Velia (Louise Sorel), who has fallen for the pretty young stud. Dinner that evening is a little awkward, as you might imagine.

Because Redford was curious to see if his revolutionary method could even transcend death, he began doing a series of experiments where he would basically hypnotize Fearing into being dead, and then successfully return him to the land of the living afterward. However, while Talmadge is there, Redford attempts to replicate this test, and something goes terribly awry, possibly because Redford’s latent jealousy about his cuckold status is causing him to subconsciously sabotage his own experiment.

This was a fun episode; it didn’t really offer any surprises, but it was a great premise with a predictably grim ending. The introduction of Redford’s unconscious subversion of his own work was a nice touch, as it gave his character a bit more depth and pathos; he was truly a mad scientist, yes, but on some level he felt a deep sense of guilt about what he had done and uncertainty about his own motives. A solid story to start the series out on, for sure.

“The Housekeeper”

More juvenile and funny than scary, but still fairly entertaining, “The Housekeeper” was written by the former story’s director Douglas Heyes (under his frequent pseudonym Matthew Howard), and directed by John Meredyth Lucas, who did a bunch of original Star Trek episodes, in addition to tons of other TV. Like the first story, it also revolves around a mad scientist of sorts.

J.R. Ewing himself, Larry Hagman, stars as a black magic enthusiast named Cedric Acton who, at the start of the tale, calls an agency to send him a housekeeper, and to make sure she’s a real woofer. He specifically requests a woman who no one else wants, and it turns out the agency has just the thing: a kind-hearted but kinda funny-looking little old lady named Miss Wattle (Jeanette Nolan, uglied up for the role and wearing a weird spacer doohickey under her upper lip to make her look even more “unattractive”).

See, Cedric is married to this gorgeous and very wealthy woman named Carlotta (Suzy Parker). All well and good, you might think, but Carlotta is a real cold-hearted bitch (at least according to Cedric, who is maybe not the best judge). Not only that, she’s been making noises about divorcing Cedric’s mystical ass, and taking her massive fortune right along with her. This is something Cedric cannot abide, so he’s figured out a way—a way that involves frogs in some capacity—to transfer one person’s entire personality into another body. With this purpose, he proceeds to wine and dine poor Miss Wattle, tempting her with all the confidence, power, and money she’ll have once her lovely, pure soul is ensconced inside the perfect form of the beautiful but nasty Carlotta.

Eventually, the reluctant Miss Wattle caves in to Cedric’s wheedling, and through frog magic (just roll with it), her identity is transferred into Carlotta, while Carlotta’s cunty self is stuck in Miss Wattle’s crooked little dumpling of a body, that Cedric then drugs into unconsciousness.

Predictably and almost immediately, the diabolical Cedric claims husbandly dominion over Miss Wattle, even though she is obviously a completely different person who just happens to inhabit the shell of Cedric’s legal wife. Wisely, Miss Wattle locks herself in her room and won’t come out while Cedric’s roving penis is hovering around. There then ensue a couple more switcheroos before the story fizzles out into a kind of unresolved finish.

Honestly, I had thought this whole folderol was going to end up with Cedric’s personality accidentally transferred into one of his frogs (which would have been awesome, though not so fun for the frog I suppose), but as it turns out, the douche doesn’t really even get punished for his misdeeds. And what’s more, it’s implied that this actually isn’t the first time he’s put an ugly old woman’s “nicer” personality into his hot wife’s body. Which raises the question of why Carlotta is still sticking around, and why she wasn’t suspicious when Cedric brought Miss Wattle home as an ostensible “housekeeper.” Maybe Carlotta’s into it, and this is her and Cedric’s kink, y’know? No judgment if that’s the case, though it would probably be best not to involve innocent domestics in your bizarre sex games.

Not so much a horror story as a kind of mean-spirited attempt at a comical morality play, this one was something of a letdown, but still diverting enough.

Episode 2
“Room with a View”

A very brief tale taking place entirely in one room, this one was adapted by Hal Dresner from his own short story, and directed by Jerrold Freedman. It also features a very young Diane Keaton in only her second TV appearance, following a turn on Love, American Style the same year.

Cranky old Mr. Bauman (Joseph Wiseman) is a bedridden invalid with some undisclosed malady. Seemingly the only bright spot in his drab day comes in the form of his perky young nurse Frances (Diane Keaton), who cares for him diligently and who is also dating the hunky family chauffeur Vic.

Frances is all about Vic, even dreaming of wedding bells, but what she doesn’t know is that Vic has also been playing hide the sausage with Mr. Bauman’s young and beautiful wife Lila (Angel Tompkins). Mr. Bauman knows all about the affair because he’s been watching the pair’s canoodling through binoculars from his upstairs window.

Since Mr. Bauman can’t get revenge on his own behalf, he rather callously decides to use Frances as his unwitting trigger man. Seeing his wife and Vic disappearing into Vic’s living quarters for a bit of afternoon nookie, Bauman gives his small pistol to Frances, oh-so-innocently telling her to take it to Vic’s place to get it cleaned. Things go about how you would expect from there.

There’s not much to the story, and it’s definitely not horror, but the interactions between Frances and Mr. Bauman are still good enough to recommend this one, though it’s pretty insubstantial overall.

“The Little Black Bag”

Strange and more than a little convoluted, “The Little Black Bag” was penned by Rod Serling himself (with all of the flowery wording his scripts were known for) and directed by Jeannot Szwarc (of Jaws 2, Somewhere in Time, and Supergirl fame).

There’s a bit of a prologue set in a sparse, “futuristic” office in the year 2098, in which a hapless worker is telling someone over the phone (presumably his boss) that a medical bag accidentally got sent back in time to 1971, and protocols must be undertaken to retrieve or destroy it before anything untoward happens.

We’re then transported to the then-present day of the early 1970s, where Burgess Meredith plays a drunken bum and former physician named Dr. William Fall. He has buddied up with another of his ilk, a hilariously gravel-voiced hobo named Heppelwhite (played by Chill Wills, who was in a shit-ton of Westerns back in the day, among other things). As it happens, Dr. Fall finds the time-traveling medical bag in a trash can, and realizes its importance. At first, he and Heppelwhite are going to hock the thing and get a few bucks to spend on booze, but while in the pawn shop, a desperate woman spots the bag and approaches him to ask if he’ll come see about her daughter, who is very sick.

Dr. Fall goes along, a grumbling Heppelwhite in tow (he just wanted the eight dollars the pawn shop proprietor was going to cough up, after all), but after Dr. Fall successfully cures the little girl using the miraculous doodads in the bag, he decides he’s going to get his shit together and use all the stuff inside for the betterment of mankind.

To this end, he goes back to the homeless shelter, fixes one old man’s rheumatoid arthritis, and completely cures another resident of his painful and terminal cancer. Thus emboldened, he decides he’s going to organize a little conference at which he’ll speak to the leading lights of the medical community about all the different ways the technology in the bag can help the human race.

Greedy Heppelwhite sees only dollar signs, though, eschewing all of this liberal “helping people” bullshit, and when Dr. Fall won’t go along with his money-grubbing agenda, he kills the doctor and impersonates him at the lecture. By this time, though, unfortunately for him, the future people have zeroed in on the bag’s location, and the dramatic demonstration Heppelwhite had planned to show the other doctors how amazing the tools in the bag were goes gruesomely sideways.

This one was a fun little sci-fi tale, bolstered significantly by great performances by Burgess Meredith and Chill Wills, who is an absolute hoot as Heppelwhite, going all in on his raspy-throated, open-mouthed, evil bum character. It’s kind of a bizarre premise, frankly, and I’m not sure I was totally on board with the ending, but overall it was a pretty good outing, though again, not scary in the least.

“The Nature of the Enemy”

Somewhat less successful was the third tale, another really short one with a completely WTF premise that someone must have come up with while high as balls. That someone, again, is Rod Serling, who wrote the teleplay; directorial duties went to Allen Reisner this time around.

We’re following the progress of a failed lunar expedition; scientists at NASA are baffled by the disappearance of a prior set of astronauts, so perhaps unwisely send another group up there to see what the hell happened to the first contingent.

All the rescue dudes can see, though, is a bizarre structure on the moon’s surface that was clearly built out of equipment and material that the first astronauts had with them. There’s also your standard, fuzzy transmission of one of the rescue astronauts looking aghast at something off screen and yelling something like, “WHAT IS THAT?!?” before the picture dissolves into static.

The NASA guys are standing around looking at footage of the structure the first astronauts built, and I said aloud, “That looks like a mousetrap,” literally a millisecond before one of the characters said the exact same thing. So yeah, spoiler alert; this episode could have been called “Giant Mousies on the Moon.” Which…okay. The ending appearance of one of said giant mousies (who was cute as a button, by the way, and reminded me fondly of Night of the Lepus) was sort of a record scratch moment, to be honest, because damn, what a random-ass idea. It didn’t even occur to me where the concept could have possibly come from until Tom said, “Oh, is it because the moon’s made of cheese?” Shit, he’s probably right, and when he said that I actually heard the loser wah-wah-WAAAAHHHHHHH horn in my head. Fuck, man. Crack a window, you know what I’m saying? Anyway. Yeah, not the proudest moment of the series. I still love Rod Serling, though.

Episode 3
“The House”

Episode three is much better, with two stories that are actually spooky and supernatural. “The House” is my second favorite of the ones I’ve watched so far, just because it’s so ambiguous, atmospheric, and dreamlike, three adjectives that I always like to describe my horror.

With a teleplay by Rod Serling, adapted from a short story by André Maurois, and directed by Gomez Addams himself, John Astin (in his television directing debut), the tale begins with a lovely young woman named Elaine (Joanna Pettet, who I recognized from the underrated 1978 haunted house film The Evil) preparing to be discharged from a pleasant stay at a sanitarium. She’s telling her psychiatrist about a recurring dream she’s been having for the last decade; it’s not a nightmare, she insists, and is actually quite serene and peaceful.

In the dream, she says, she’s driving in her convertible in slow motion, her beautiful long hair blowing in the wind. Though she has never been in this area before, she somehow knows to go down a particular secluded road, which leads to a house that she feels very drawn to. Enchanted, she approaches the front door and knocks, but no one answers, and after a bit, she gets back in her car and drives away, though she tells the doctor that the front door of the house opens just a crack as she’s leaving the house behind.

Not long after leaving the hospital, Elaine finds herself driving down a road, a slowly dawning sense of déjà vu coming over her, and naturally she ends up finding the house from her dream, exactly as she imagined it. As she stands in the driveway marveling, she’s approached by a real estate agent, who tells her the house is for sale. She wants to go inside and have a look at it, and even though in her dream she only saw the exterior, when she gets inside she knows exactly where everything is.

The agent tells her the house is super cheap because it’s supposedly haunted, but not in a crazy, Amityville Horror kinda way; no one got murdered in there or anything like that. It’s just, y’know, sort of eerie, and the agent further implies that he thinks the previous owners might have just been imagining the haunting, or creating it psychologically. Elaine agrees to buy the place right on the spot.

Shortly after moving in, she’s taking a nap one afternoon when she hears a knock on the front door. Gosh, who do you think it might be? In slow motion, she elegantly descends the staircase, but by the time she opens the door a crack, whoever was at the door is gone. All she can see is the tail end of a convertible rounding the far corner of the driveway. She calls her psychiatrist and tells him that she is the ghost.

This episode was always one of the main ones I remembered from the series when I watched it back in the day. Even though it’s not overtly scary, it’s pleasingly unsettling; I love these kinds of circular narratives, where you’re unsure if the protagonist is actually alive or not, whether everything is in their heads, or what. Nothing is really explained here, but it doesn’t need to be; that’s what makes the story so impactful. A definite winner.

“Certain Shadows on the Wall”

Another ghost story, though a slightly more traditional one, “Certain Shadows on the Wall” was written by Rod Serling (adapted from “The Shadows on the Wall” by Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman) and directed by Jeff Corey (best known as a very prolific actor whose career spanned an astonishing sixty years; he starred in “The Dead Man,” as previously mentioned). It’s less creepy than the first story, but still a good time.

Three siblings—cruel and dickish Stephen (Louis Hayward), stoic and acerbic Ann (Grayson Hall), and naïve, happy-go-lucky Rebecca (Rachel Roberts)—live in the family mansion and care for their dying sister Emma (Agnes Moorehead), who has been sickly all her life. Bitter, hateful Stephen resents this burden the most, as he’s the one tasked with reading Emma’s beloved Dickens to her for hours each day.

He is also mightily annoyed by the fact that Emma received the entire family fortune after the death of their father, and the other three siblings have had to live off Emma’s largesse ever since. Ann and Rebecca seem to take the situation with some measure of grace, and Ann in particular throws some excellent shade at her ungrateful and constantly complaining brother, but Stephen is very openly wishing for Emma to hurry up and drop dead already so the remaining three can split up the money and he can get the hell out of this gloomy old pile.

Well, luckily for him, Emma obligingly does die soon after, although it’s made pretty clear that Stephen—who is a doctor, by the way—has decided to speed the process along by poisoning his sister. The dastardly Stephen, gloating in a most unseemly fashion, immediately calls the meat wagon to have the body removed, and then starts divvying up all the antiques and valuables contained in the house with a view to selling his entire share.

Emma is going to have her final say, however, even though she’s as dead as Vaudeville. In the downstairs parlor, a shadow appears on the wall that is very obviously a representation of Emma, sitting up in her bed. Stephen tries to downplay the whole thing, first thinking it’s an actual shadow caused by a trick of the light, then pivoting to thinking it’s maybe a weird stain. He tries to paint over it, though, to no avail. The other two sisters, who seem to have immediately accepted that the manifestation is paranormal, attempt to convince Stephen that Emma’s ghost is trying to communicate with them, but Stephen just isn’t having it.

Because the sisters are certain that Stephen had something to do with Emma’s death (I mean, he wasn’t exactly being sneaky about it), they decide to make the punishment fit the crime, as it were; Rebecca straight up poisons his tea, and honestly, the dude had it coming. He keels over as well, and the two remaining siblings settle into the parlor, with Emma’s shadow now joined by the shadow of their deceased brother Stephen, reading to her from an open book. The family is all together again, and they sigh contentedly.
This one was another solid episode that was made all the more satisfying by the loathsome Stephen getting his just desserts at the hands of his sisters. Incidentally, in the original story, it’s a brother named Edward who’s killed by the other brother Henry, and not a sister.

Episode 4
“Make Me Laugh”

Yet another installment that was more like a Twilight Zone style morality tale than a horror story, “Make Me Laugh” was again penned by Rod Serling, and directed by none other than Steven Spielberg. It’s basically a variation on the “careful what you wish for” trope, with the more specific codicil that when offered a wish, be very, VERY cautious about how you word it.

Actual successful comedian Godfrey Cambridge plays a failing comedian named Jackie Slater, whose schtick is so dire you can probably see the flop sweat from space. The manager of the club he’s performing in (played by Grandpa Munster himself, Al Lewis) tells him to GTFO with his unfunny ass, though Jackie’s kindly agent (played by Tom Bosley) tries to raise his spirits, insisting that things will get better, shortly before secretly amscraying to represent a folk band somewhere.

While Jackie is drinking away his sorrows, he’s approached by a very prolix fellow in brownface (ummmm), wearing a turban that looks as though it might have been cobbled together from one of those unsanitary rotating towel deals they used to have in old restrooms. This is Chatterje, a supposedly Indian guru played by the very white Jackie Vernon (otherwise known as the voice of Frosty the Snowman from the Rankin/Bass special), and yes, it’s just as cringe as it sounds.

Chatterje tells Jackie that he’s actually not a very good guru (which he insists on pronouncing with a significant emphasis on the second syllable), and that according to guru rules, which are apparently a thing that exists, all gurus have to perform at least one miracle a month, or they…I dunno, have their love beads revoked? Their chakras realigned? Their third eye poked out? Anyway, poor Chatterje only has one hour left to perform a miracle, but the catch is that the miracle has to be performed on a willing recipient.

Well, Jackie is pretty drunk, depressed, and desperate, so he’s willing to go along with Chatterje’s little scheme. Sure, Jackie says, do a miracle on me. I want to make everyone laugh. Why he didn’t just go with the far more straightforward statement, “I want to be the greatest comedian who ever lived” is a mystery for the ages.

As you might have surmised, now every word out of Jackie’s mouth causes everyone who hears him to go into paroxysms of hysterical laughter. He becomes the country’s most famous comic practically overnight, causing hilarity wherever he goes, even when he utters jokes so old that the Australopithecines have heard them all before. Hell, he doesn’t even have to tell jokes per se; he just says random shit and people bust up. It’s easy comedy and easy money for sure, but of course Jackie soon becomes dissatisfied, because he no longer has to work for a laugh the way he used to.

But his fame eventually brings him a welcome offer from a very prestigious filmmaker who thinks that Jackie would absolutely kill it in a dramatic role. Jackie is stoked, thinking this is just the challenge he needs, but of course when he goes to the audition, everyone cracks up at him when he’s trying to be serious. As he’s leaving the audition, devastated, he runs into Chatterje again, and although the guRU tells him there’s only one wish per customer (another one of those guru rules I’ve heard so much about, I guess), Jackie eventually strong-arms him into giving him another go. Does he says something sensible, like, “I’d like to be the greatest dramatic actor the world has ever seen”? He does not. Instead, he stupidly says that now he just wants to make everyone cry instead. SIGH.

Luckily, this state of affairs lasts all of about five seconds before Jackie is run over by a passing car (yes, really), and an old woman at a flower stall cries at his death. Which maybe isn’t so much a result of the guru wish as it is someone who just saw a man get horribly killed right in front of her face.

Again, this one’s more on the humorous end than anything, and though the acting is good, it’s pretty obvious where it’s going to go. Besides that, the whole thing is really infuriating because you really want to slap Jackie’s character for being such a dimbulb and not knowing how to ask for something in a way that doesn’t end up biting him in the ass. Also the finale was a bit abrupt, but maybe Rod Serling wrote himself into a corner and just said, “Fuck it, squish him with a Buick. The end.” Which is also known as the Prius Ex Machina Method. See, I can be a failed comedian too! Thank you, I’m here all week. Tip your waitresses, try the veal, and so forth.

“Clean Kills and Other Trophies”

Another morality-style story from Rod Serling (this time directed by Walter Doniger, probably best known for directing a bunch of episodes of Peyton Place), this was another one that was pretty predictable, but it had a slightly more gruesome vibe to it, and the villain of the piece was sufficiently hateable.

Raymond Massey plays a cruel, arrogant blowhard named Colonel Archie Dittman, one of those insufferable “big game hunter” types who just loves to regale his bored-as-fuck guests with self-aggrandizing tales of his dominion over the animal kingdom. He has the standard issue trophy room, the standard issue disdain of anything he perceives as weakness, and the standard issue racism. That last thing comes in the form of his treatment of his African butler Tom, who he refers to as “a specimen” and “a savage,” while conceding that he was actually able to be educated (at Oxford, no less) so it’s all good, even though Tom apparently still believes in black magic, so you can take the man out of Africa, but you can’t yadda yadda.

The Colonel also has a son named Archie Jr. (Barry Brown), who is the complete opposite of his father, it seems. He hates guns and hunting, and comes across more as a sensitive, artistic type (and possibly gay, though I might be reading too much into the coding here). Naturally, the Colonel is absolutely disgusted by his “cowardly” son, calling him “a dish of jelly consommé,” among other things. Archie Jr. seems sort of inured to this shitty treatment by now, just kinda letting it slide off his back, or so it seems.

At the beginning of the story, there’s a bit of a kerfuffle, because the Colonel has decided that Archie Jr. won’t receive a penny of his inheritance until he actually goes out hunting with his dad and kills an animal on his own. Junior is obviously not enthused about this, and both Tom and the sympathetic family lawyer Jeffrey Pierce (Tom Troupe) try to talk the Colonel out of it, but nothing doing; a man ain’t a man until he’s blown a hole through one of his fellow mammals and mounted its head on the wall for posterity, dontcha know.

During this whole confrontation about the inheritance, Archie Jr. does actually blow his stack and snatch a rifle, almost shooting his dad with it, but unfortunately Tom intervenes, and the Colonel remains alive…for a little longer, anyway.

So the hunting trip ensues, and a deer soon makes an appearance in a clearing. Junior draws down on it, but he takes a little bit too long to shoot, causing his apoplectic dad to smack at him, which makes the shot go wild and hit the deer in the lung, which doesn’t kill it right away. The Colonel pisses and moans about it not being a clean kill and how they’ll now have to track the deer for hours to finish the animal off, even though he was the one who made the shot miss in the first place by being an impatient jackhole.

He’s still bitching when they get home that evening, and Tom is apparently as sick of the Colonel’s shit as everyone else is by this point, because when the Colonel comes in his trophy room, he finds the butler in there, wearing ceremonial garb and praying to his gods. Incidentally, the lawyer asked Tom earlier why the hell Tom even stayed with the douchebag Colonel all these years, but Tom says he wanted to look after Archie, and make sure he was all right, because his dad obviously wasn’t the man for that job.

So you can probably guess what goes down; Tom doesn’t actually kill the Colonel himself, but the gods he prayed to come through in the clutch, killing the great white hunter (offscreen) as punishment for his disrespect of nature, and mounting his head on the wall of the trophy room as a bit of poetic justice. Finally, we have a good, horror-style ending, despite its predictability.

This was another solid episode; the Colonel was such a fucker that you were happy to see his severed noggin at the end, and the character of Tom was a particular highlight, always conducting himself with unflappable dignity, despite the constant slights and insults from his employer. The message of the piece was pretty heavy-handed, for sure (I mean, this is Rod Serling we’re talking about), but I didn’t really mind it.

Episode 5
“Pamela’s Voice”

Another brief but entertaining one, “Pamela’s Voice” was written by Rod Serling again and directed by Richard Benedict (who starred in It! The Terror from Beyond Space, among other things). The story is a two-hander, featuring only the splendid pair of John Astin and Phyllis Diller as a bickering married couple.

Jonathan (John Astin) is chilling in his parlor alongside a coffin, which you presume contains the mortal remains of his wife Pamela (Phyllis Diller), who Jonathan pushed down the stairs due to her incessant talking and nagging. Though he thinks he’s now finally free of her grating voice, he discovers he’s mistaken when she starts suddenly yapping at him all disembodied-like.

Moments later, she appears as a spirit and starts giving Jonathan a real tongue-lashing about the whole shoving-her-down-the-staircase situation. She smugly reveals to her former husband that she got to go to heaven after she died, and in heaven, everything is fine…in other words, you can do whatever the hell you want. And what Pamela wants is to torment Jonathan by spitefully flapping her jaws at him 24/7. Which I find I can’t really blame her for, to be honest; he did kill her in cold blood, after all.

Jonathan believes at first that he’s simply hallucinating his dead wife because of guilt, hence all he has to do is, y’know, stop feeling guilty and seeing things, and everything will be copacetic. Sucks to be him, though, because Pamela points out that the coffin in the room doesn’t contain her body…she died months ago. It’s actually Jonathan in there, who recently perished due to all the excessive drinking, partying, and whoring he indulged in after Pamela’s death. So yeah…Jonathan is in hell, which means that Pamela can now screech at him…forever.

This was a fun story, with fantastic performances; it was a particular blast seeing John Astin playing against type as a cruel, murderous douchebag rather than the lovable eccentrics he usually plays. And Phyllis Diller is always a delight to watch; she clearly relishes her role as a nagging harridan, and plays it to the hilt. Once again, this was more comedic than scary, but it had a wicked streak of black humor and some great dialogue, so I can’t be too mad.

“Lone Survivor”

This was another one written by Rod Serling, who repurposed one of his Twilight Zone stories (“Judgment Night”) with slight variations. The director this time around was Eugene Levitt.

John Colicos (who I recognized from The Changeling and as Kor in Star Trek) plays a nameless man who is found adrift in a lifeboat by the crew of a ship in the middle of the ocean. The year is 1915, but bizarrely, the lifeboat bears the name Titanic…which either means someone is playing a very tasteless joke, or this guy has been floating around in the open ocean since the doomed ocean liner sank in 1912.

The man seemingly has a hard time explaining to the Captain (Thorin Thatcher) what exactly is going on, and there’s a pretty effective mystery element to the whole thing, as the crew members try to determine how this man came to be here, when there have been no reports of sinking ships anywhere in the area.

There’s then a mid-story reveal that the rescue ship is actually the RMS Lusitania, which for those not familiar with their seafaring history, was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat during World War I, which resulted in the deaths of over 1,200 people.

It turns out that the titular Lone Survivor was actually present at the sinking of the Titanic…but because he put on a dress and tried to pass for a woman to get to the lifeboats first, and because he shoved some people out of the way to get there on top of all that, he’s now condemned to relive his horrible experience for all eternity. Calling himself a human version of the Flying Dutchman, he explains that he is in his own personal hell, trapped on a lifeboat until another ill-starred ship happens by to pick him up. Since he knows the ship that rescues him is always on the cusp of disaster, he tries to warn the crew of the danger they’re in, but there’s also a Cassandra aspect to his curse, it seems, because it’s also fated that no one will believe him.

Just as expected, the man vainly tries to tell the Captain that they’re going to be hit by a torpedo, but of course everyone thinks he’s delusional. He desperately runs out on the deck, and even sees the periscope of the attacking submarine, but his warnings fall on deaf ears. The Lusitania goes down, and the crew realize they’ve been nothing but phantoms in this man’s recurring nightmare the whole time.

The end coda shows another crew on a more modern ship spotting the telltale lifeboat through their binoculars, and approaching to effect a rescue. Because I am a nerd who apparently knew more about sunken ships than I realized, I said aloud, “What ship is this, the Andrea Doria?” And yep, I called it. For those unaware, the SS Andrea Doria sank in 1956 after colliding with another ocean liner, the Stockholm, off the coast of Nantucket. Amazingly, there were only 46 casualties; 1,660 of the 1,706 passengers and crew were successfully rescued.

I can’t remember the original Twilight Zone version of this story, but it’s just inherently a great premise; the setup is eerie and weird, and the mystery deepens as the tale unfolds. John Colicos was great as the tormented survivor, and the whole thing had an effectively spooky vibe.

“The Doll”

Based on a story by the legendary Algernon Blackwood and directed by Rudi Dorn, this one was another refreshingly creepy installment, even though it deals with the rather careworn trope of the haunted doll (though in all fairness, it wasn’t quite so tired back when the original story was published in the 1940s).

John Williams plays a British Colonel, Hymber Masters, who’s been stationed in some backwater in India for many years. He arrives back home for a spell, eager to reconnect with his young niece and ward, Monica (Jewel Blanch).

Problem is, Monica is now in possession of a terrifying-looking doll that she carries around everywhere. The governess, Miss Danton (Shani Wallis) tells the Colonel that the girl seems obsessed with the hideous thing and she’s starting to worry. The Colonel harrumphs at Miss Danton that she should have taken the doll away immediately, but Miss Danton says she didn’t because she assumed that the Colonel himself had sent it as a gift; the doll arrived in a box postmarked from the area of India where the Colonel was stationed, you see.

It’s clear that the Colonel knows more about where this doll might have come from than he’s willing to let on, but he basically just tells Miss Danton that they’ll have to get the doll away from Monica somehow. The Colonel offers to get the child another, much nicer doll, but Monica demurs, saying she’s quite fond of this one, and that it even talks to her. The Colonel buys her a new doll anyway, but Monica attempts to return it to him, saying the original doll doesn’t like it. The ugly doll apparently later tears the new doll into pieces.

It soon comes to light that the doll was sent not to Monica, but to the Colonel, as revenge for an execution he ordered while in India. The executed man’s brother, Pandit Chola (played not by an Indian actor, but by Sicilian/Spanish actor Henry Silva) arrives to exposit that the doll is essentially an indestructible vessel for a spirit of vengeance that will continue to do its thing until the Colonel is dead.

Though the doll does eventually succeed in its mission and is thereafter destroyed, the Colonel gets the last laugh, imbuing his own likeness into a cursed doll that he then sends to Pandit.

This was also a pretty great story, though somewhat similar to another Twilight Zone episode, the famous “Living Doll.” The evil doll in this installment is legitimately scary-looking, and there are some fantastic, quick shots of her creepy-ass face that were genuinely chilling. Even the Colonel doll at the end was wonderfully unsettling, so kudos to the prop department for the puppet work here, which is really solid. Another good episode all around.

Episode 6
“They’re Tearing Down Tim Riley’s Bar”

Written by Rod Serling and directed by Don Taylor (Escape from the Planet of the Apes), this story was actually nominated for an Emmy in 1971 for “Outstanding Single Program.” It’s certainly one of the most lauded and fondly remembered installments of the series, and while I concede that it’s certainly an excellent dramatic presentation with stellar acting performances, it’s definitely not horror. It falls, in fact, in a particular subgenre that I’m not sure has a name, but that I like to call “boomer nostalgia porn.” These types of narratives generally revolve around a middle-aged man who is fearing that his best days are behind him, and growing ever more maudlin about the fact that he’s becoming obsolete. Hence, he longs to return to the “simpler” days of his youth (usually the 1940s or 1950s), when everyone was friendly and nice and wholesome and life wasn’t quite so fast-paced and complicated and impersonal. I have to admit I’m not usually a fan of these types of stories, as they strike me as a bit pointless and poisonously reactionary, trying to harken back to some idealized past that never really existed, but at least “They’re Tearing Down Tim Riley’s Bar” seems to recognize and criticize this to some degree, though it does also sympathize with the main character’s point of view.

William Windom plays Randy Lane, a 48-year-old plastics salesman who has worked for his firm for 25 years, putting in excellent work for all that time. Just lately, though, he seems to be having some kind of crisis; the firm has hired an up-and-coming salesman who is demolishing Randy’s numbers and also relishes being a total bitch to Randy (the younger salesman, by the way, is played by Bert Convy, who I mostly recognized as a game show host, specifically on Win, Lose or Draw). In addition, Randy has never gotten over the death of his beloved wife from pneumonia many years before, and the fact that he wasn’t there for her when she passed away unexpectedly.

And as if the universe is trying to twist the knife in even further, Randy’s favorite watering hole, Tim Riley’s, has closed and is slated for demolition, to make way for a new office building with a fancy bank of elevators and a huge parking garage. All of Randy’s best memories—his and his wife’s first date, his welcome home party when he returned from World War II—were had in that bar, and he’s starting to feel as though the world is leaving him behind, or “elbowing him off,” as he puts it later on. Because of this, he’s taken to drinking rather a lot during work hours, which does little to bolster his flagging sales performance or endear him to his boss.

One person who does have endless sympathy and warm feelings toward Randy is his secretary and friend, Lynn (Diane Baker, who I immediately recognized as Senator Ruth Martin from The Silence of the Lambs), who does everything but straight up ask him out. Randy is too depressed to really return her very obvious affection, though.

So the bulk of the story is basically Randy slowly getting drunker and more bummed out, while he also begins having realistic flashbacks/hallucinations of happier times revolving around Tim Riley’s. After one particular bender, he breaks into the bar to have a drink, but luckily for him, his understanding cop friend is there to bail him out. Eventually his shenanigans land him in the drunk tank, though, and he gets fired after his boss finds out.

At this point, I thought I remembered this installment having a really dark ending, and indeed it seems as though it’s going to go just that way; Randy leaves the office dejectedly, saying goodbye to Lynn in a way that sounds final, and then he sneaks into Tim Riley’s right before the wrecking ball is set to do its work. Is Randy going to let himself be crushed under the masonry of his beloved bar, buried along with his own romanticized past?

Well, no, and please don’t take this the wrong way, but I kind of wish that had been the ending; not because I didn’t like or sympathize with Randy’s character, but because I thought it made more sense with the narrative arc of the tale thus far. As it turns out, Randy wanders out of Tim Riley’s in slow motion, and then overhears a group of people singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” in a bar/restaurant across the street. When he goes in, he finds all his work colleagues having a surprise party for him; earlier on, Lynn went to their boss and guilted him into actually acknowledging and appreciating all the hard work Randy had done over the past quarter century instead of throwing him away like yesterday’s trash. So Randy enters the party, a smile slowly dawning on his face, Lynn kissing his cheek, while the scene keeps cutting back and forth to the wrecking ball getting closer to Tim Riley’s.

Now, I suppose you could argue that because of all the setup about the hallucinations Randy’s been having throughout the story, that the surprise party is a hallucination too, and he’s just seeing that as he dies under the wreckage of his favorite bar. Since I’m cynical, that’s how I’m going to read it, especially because of the weird, intercut, slow-motion way that the final sequence is shot.

But in all honesty, I think the last scene was intended to be as straightforward as it appeared, leading me to believe that the point of the story was one: that yes, older folks should absolutely be appreciated for their contributions, but also two: that said older people have to be careful not to lose themselves in the “good old days” so much that they don’t appreciate the good stuff going on in their lives right now (such as Lynn’s obvious love for Randy that he mostly seemed to ignore, for example). Which is fair enough. Hell, though, Randy’s character wasn’t even that old (he says he’s 48), but he talked like he was inches from the grave, which maybe he would have been back in the early 1970s and with his not-so-healthy lifestyle. But shit, I’m a couple years older than he is, and I’m still doing all kinds of fun stuff, so I don’t really get this “poor me, I’m so old, the world is abandoning me” thing. Maybe it’s generational, coming from an era when men defined themselves by their jobs and tended to feel like they had outlived their usefulness once they retired. But fuck that; I always thought that was a really defeatist attitude.

Anyway, this one was kinda schmaltzy for me, but otherwise excellent as far as script and acting was concerned. Just don’t expect a horror story, because there’s absolutely nothing scary or dark about it at all.

“The Last Laurel”

This tale, the last story of season one, was pretty insignificant, with a kind of “why bother” energy about it; I guess because the first story was so long and this one was less than ten minutes, it felt like it was just thrown together to fill out the episode’s runtime. And that’s kind of a shame, because I really liked the concept of this, but there wasn’t any room for character development or a deeper exploration of the paranormal phenomena at the heart of the narrative. The teleplay was again by Rod Serling, who adapted it from a novel called The Horsehair Trunk by Davis Grubb (who also wrote the novel on which the excellent 1955 film The Night of the Hunter was based on). It was directed by Daryl Duke.

We meet a man named Marius Davis (Jack Cassidy), who used to be some kind of elite athlete until an accident rendered his legs immobile. He’s now confined to his bed, and clearly very bitter about the shit hand life has dealt him.

The brunt of his ire seems to be directed at his wife Susan (Martine Beswick) and his physician Dr. Armstrong (Martin E. Brooks), who he’s convinced are having an affair. The story never makes it clear if that’s the case or if Marius is simply paranoid; it’s implied to be the latter, since Susan tells the doctor at one point that Marius also thought she was fucking a member of the household staff at one point.

Well, Marius can’t move from his bed, but he’s apparently been able to find a way to work around this, by essentially astral projecting out of his body. His projected form, as it happens, can still interact with objects just like a physical body would, so Marius decides he’s going to take revenge on his faithless wife and/or doctor (I’m actually not sure which one he was targeting), with the added bonus of having a perfect alibi for the murder because he can’t actually walk at all.

To this end, Marius’s “soul” pops out his body and starts stumbling around; he picks up a heavy candlestick and intends to bash in the doc’s or his wife’s head with it. But in the course of this endeavor, a storm knocks out the power for a moment, and his clumsy ghost ass becomes disoriented in the darkness. The long and short of it is that he ends up busting open his own skull with the candlestick after staggering into the wrong room. So now he doesn’t even have a crippled body to go back to, which serves him right, really.

As I said, because this story was so brief and abrupt, we learn next to nothing about any of the characters. What was Marius like before the accident, and what was his relationship with his wife like previously? Did his wife really sleep around, giving him reason to be suspicious, or was his bitterness simply poisoning his mind? And how on earth did Marius learn to project his consciousness out of his body? I would have liked to see a bit more backstory about that; it didn’t need to be over-explained, but something more than, “Oh, by the way, he can do this amazing thing” would have been nice.

Also, the ghostly special effects were not all that great, even for the time, and look comical rather than spooky. I admit that it wasn’t even clear at first that Marius’s astral self was confused and stumbling around in the hall, because the way it was shot was so befuddling. So like I said, a cool concept for sure, but one that needed way more fleshing out and less silly optical effects.

Well, one season down, two more to go! Stay tuned for whenever I get around to discussing them, and until then, keep it creepy, my friends.