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 . *
The cancellation of The Outer Limits was more due to stupid programming on the part of its parent network, ABC, than to any real lack of interest, even though the show had become slightly flabby in the second season following Stefano's departure. To some extent it could be said that when Stefano left, he took all the good bears with him. The series was never quite the same. Still, a good many programs have been able to endure a flabby stretch without cancellation (TV is, after all, a pretty flabby medium). But when ABC switched The Outer Limits from its Monday-night time slot, where it was up against two fading game shows, to Saturday night-a night when the younger audience The Outer Limits was aimed at was either at the movies or just out cruising-it faded quietly from the scene.
We have mentioned syndication briefly, but the only fantasy program which can be seen regularly on the independent TV stations is The Twilight Zone , which was, by and large, nonviolent. Thriller can be seen late at night in certain big-city markets that have one or more of those independent stations, but a run of The Outer Limits is a much rarer catch. Although it was presented, during its first run, in what is now considered "the family hour," a change in mores has made it one of those "iffy" programs for the independents, who feel safer running sitcoms, game shows, and movies (not to mention the old put-yourhands-on-your-TV-set-brother-and-you-will-be-healed ! bit).
And by the way, if you get it in your area, warm up the old Betamax and send me the complete catalogue by way of the publisher. On second thought, you better not. It's probably illegal. But treasure the run while you've got it; like Thriller , the like of The Outer Limits will not be seen again. Even The Wonderful World of Disney is going off the air after a twenty-six-year run.
*For much of this material I am indebted to the entry on The Outer Limits in The Science Fiction Handbook , published by Doubleday (New York: 1979). The entry (p. 441 of this huge volume) was written by John Brosnan and Peter Nicholls.
4
We'll not say from the sublime to the ridiculous, because TV rarely produces the sublime, and series TV has never produced it; let us instead say from the workmanlike to the atrocious.
The Night Stalker .
Earlier on in this chapter I said that television was too homogenized to cough up anything that was really charmingly awful; ABC-TV's The Night Stalker series is the exception that proves the rule.
It's not the movie that I'm talking about, remember. The film of The Night Stalker was one of the best movies ever made for TV. It was based on an abysmal horror novel, The Kolchak Tapes , by Jeff Rice-the novel was issued as a paperback after the unpublished manuscript landed on producer Dan Curtis's desk and became the basis of the film.
A short side trip here, if you don't mind too much. Dan Curtis became associated with the horror field as producer of what must have been the strangest soap opera ever to run on the tube; it was called Dark Shadows. Shadows became something of a nine-days' wonder during the last two years of its run. Originally conceived as a soft-focus ladies' gothic of the type then so popular in paperback (they have now been largely replaced by those sweet/savage love stories a la Rosemary Rogers, Katherine Woodiwiss, and Laurie McBain), it eventually mutated-like Thriller -into something quite different from what had first been intended. Dark Shadows , under Curtis's inspired hand, became a kind of supernatural mad hatters' tea party (it even came on the air at the traditional hour for tea, four in the afternoon), and hypnotized viewers were treated to a seriocomic panorama of hell-a weirdly evocative combination of Dante's ninth circle and Spike Jones. One member of the put-upon Collins family, Barnabas Collins, was a vampire. He was played by Jonathan Frid, who became an overnight celebrity.
His celebrity, unfortunately, was every bit as lasting as Vaughan Meader's (and if you don't remember Vaughan Meader, send me a stamped, self-addressed postcard and I will enlighten you).
One turned in to Dark Shadows every day, convinced that things could become no more lunatic . . . and yet somehow they did. At one point the entire cast of characters was transported back into the seventeenth century for a six -week turn in fancy dress. Barnabas had a cousin who was a werewolf. Another cousin was a combination witch-succubus. Other soap operas have always, of course, practiced their own bemusing forms of madness; my own favorite has always been the Kid Trick. The way the Kid Trick works is this: one of the characters on a soap opera will have a baby in March. By July it will be two; in November it will be six; the following February it will be lying in the hospital, comatose, after being hit by a car while returning home from the sixth, grade; and by the March following its birth, the child will be eighteen and ready to begin really joining in the fun by getting the girl next door pregnant, or turning suicidal, or possibly by announcing to his horrified parents that he's a homosexual. The Kid Trick is worthy of a Robert Sheckley alternate-world story, but at least the characters on most soap operas stay dead once their life-support machinery is turned off (following which there will be a four-month trial with the turner-offer in the dock for mercy killing). The actors and actresses who "died" picked up their final checks and went job hunting again. Not so on Dark Shadows . The dead simply came back as ghosts. It was better than the Kid Trick.