Danse Macabre

CHAPTER VIII

The Glass Teat, or, This Monster Was Brought to You by Gainesburgers

ALL THOSE OF YOU out there among the great unwashed who ever believed that TV sucks were dead wrong, you see; as Harlan Ellison pointed out in his sometimes amusing, sometimes scathing essays on television, TV does not suck; it is sucked. Ellison called his two-volume diatribe on the subject The Glass Teat, and if you've not read it, be aware that it comes recommended as a kind of compass with this particular stretch of the territory. I read the book with amazed absorption three years ago, the fact that Ellison had devoted valuable time and space to such forgettable series of yesteryear as Alias Smith and Jones barely obtruding on a total volcanic effect that made me suspect I was experiencing something roughly similar to a six-hour rant delivered by Fidel Castro. Always assuming that Fidel was really on that day.

Ellison circles back and back to television in his work, like a man held in thrall by a snake he knows to be ultimately deadly. For no apparent reason, the longish introduction to Strange Wine (a book we'll discuss at some length next chapter), Ellison's 1978 collection of short stories, is a diatribe on TV titled "Revealed at Last! What Killed the Dinosaurs! And You Don't Look So Terrific Yourself.” When you strip Ellison's TV-rap to its core, it is simple enough and not blazingly original (for blazing originality, you have to read how he says it) : TV is a spoiler, Ellison says. It spoils story; it spoils those who make the stories; eventually it spoils those who watch the stories; the milk from this particular teat is poisoned. This is a thesis I would agree with completely, but let me point out two facts.

Harlan has a TV. A big one.

I have a TV which is even bigger than Harlan's. It is, in fact, a Panasonic CinemaVision which dominates one whole corner of my living room.

Mea culpa, all right.

I can rationalize Harlan's TV and my own monster, although I cannot completely excuse either of us-and I should add that Ellison is a bachelor, and he can watch the thing twenty hours a day if he wants and hurt nobody but himself. I, on the other hand, have three young children in the house-ten, eight, and four-who are exposed to this gadget; to its possible radiation, its untrue colors, and its magic window on a vulgar, tawdry world where cameras ogle the butts of Playboy bunnies and linger over endless visions of an upper-upper-upper-middle-class materialism that, for most Americans, has never existed and never will. Mass starvation is a way of life in Biafra; in Cambodia, dying children are shitting out their own collapsed intestines; in the Middle East a kind of messianic madness is in danger of swallowing up all rationality; and here at home we sit mesmerized by Richard Dawson on Family Feud and watch Buddy Ebsen as Barnaby Jones. I think my own three kids have a better fix on the reality of Gilligan, the Skipper, and Mr. Howell than they do on the reality of what happened at Three Mile Island in March of 1979. In fact, I know they do.

Horror has not fared particularly well on TV, if you except something like the six o'clock news, where footage of black GIs with their legs blown off, villages and kids on fire, bodies in trenches, and whole swatches of jungle being coated with good old Agent Orange sent kids into the streets, where they would march and light candles and say dopey, talismanic "in” things to each other until we withdrew, the North Vietnamese took over, and more starvation on mass levels resulted-not to mention opening the way for such really upstanding, humanitarian personages as Cambodia's Pol Pot. The whole sour stew sure wasn't much like a TV show, was it? Just ask yourself if any chain of events so ridiculous could ever have happened on Hawaii Five-O. The answer is of course not. If Steve McGarrett had been President from 1968 to 1976, the whole abortion could have been avoided. Steve, Danny, and Chin Ho would have cleared the mess up.

The sort of horrors we have been discussing in this book labor under the very fact of their unreality (a fact which Harlan Ellison himself recognizes well; he refuses to allow the word fantasy to be printed on book covers as a descriptive term for the stories inside). We have treated the question "Why do you want to write horror stories in a world that is so full of real horrors?"; I am now suggesting that the reason horror has done so poorly, by and large, on TV, is a statement which is closely related to that question, to wit: "It is very difficult to write a successful horror story in a world which is so full of real horrors." A ghost in the turret room of a Scottish castle just cannot compete with thousand-megaton warheads, CBW bugs, or nuclear power plants that have apparently been put together from Aurora model kits by ten-year-olds with poor eye-hand coordination. Even Old Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre pales beside those dead sheep in Utah, killed by one of Our Finer Nerve Gases. If the wind had been blowing the other way when that happened, Salt Lake City might have gotten a really good dose of what killed the sheep. And, my good friends, someday the wind is not going to be blowing the right way. You may count on it; tell your Congressman I said so. Sooner or later the wind always changes.

Well, horror can be done. That emotion can still be triggered by people who are dedicated to doing it, and there's something optimistic in the fact that people can still, in spite of all the world's real horrors, be brought to the point of the scream by something that is patently impossible. It can be done by the writer or the director . . . if their hands are untied.

For the writer, the most galling thing about TV must be that he or she is forbidden from bringing all of his or her powers to bear; the predicament of the TV writer is strikingly similar to the predicament of the human race as envisioned in Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron," where bright people are fitted with electro-shock caps to disrupt their thinking periodically, agile people are fitted with weights, and people with great artistic talent are forced to wear heavy, distorting glasses to destroy their clearer perception of the world around them.

As a result, a perfect state of equality has been achieved . . . but at what a price.

The ideal writer for the TV medium is a fella or a gal with a smidgen of talent, a lot of gall, and the soul of a drone. In Hollywood's current and exquisitely vulgar parlance, he or she must "give good meeting." Let any of these qualifications be tampered with, and the writer is apt to start feeling like poor old Harrison Bergeron. It has made Ellison, who wrote for Star Trek, The Outer Limits, and The Young Lawyers, to name just a few, a little bit crazy, I think. But if he weren't, it would be impossible to respect him. His craziness is a kind of Purple Heart, like Joseph (Police Story) Wambaugh's ulcers. There is no reason why a writer cannot make a living doing TV on a constant week-in-week-out basis; all that writer really needs is a low Alpha-wave pattern and a perception of writing as the mental equivalent of bucking crates of soda up onto a Coca-Cola truck.

Part of this is the result of federal regulation and part of it is proof of the maxim which states that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. TV is in almost every American home, and the financial stakes are enormous. As a result, television has become more and more cautious over the years. It has become like a fat old spayed tomcat dedicated to the preservation of the status quo and to the concept of LOP-Least Objectionable Programming.

Television is, in fact, like that fat, wimpy kid who most of us can remember from our childhood neighborhoods, the big, slack kid who would cry if you gave him two-for-flinching, the kid who always looked guilty when the teacher asked who put the mouse in her drawer, the kid who was always picked on because he was always afraid of being picked on.

Now the simple fact of horror fiction in whatever medium you choose . . . the bedrock of horror fiction, we might say, is simply this: you gotta scare the audience. Sooner or later you gotta put on the gruesome mask and go booga-booga. I can remember an official in the fledgling New York Mets organization worrying about the improbable crowds that gang of happy-go-lucky schmucks was drawing. "Sooner or later we're going to have to sell these people some steak along with the sizzle," was how this fellow expressed it. The same is true with horror. The reader will not feed forever on innuendo and vapors; sooner or later even the great H. P. Lovecraft had to produce whatever was lurking in the crypt or in the steeple.

Most of the great film directors in the field have chosen to get the horror up front; to cram a large block of it down the viewer's throat until he almost chokes on it and then lead the viewer on, teasing him, drawing every cent of the psychological interest due on that original scare.

The primer that every would-be horror director studies in this matter is, of course, the definitive horror film of the period we're discussing-Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Here is a movie where blood was kept to a minimum and terror was kept to a maximum. In the famous shower scene we see Janet Leigh; we see the knife; but we never see the knife in Janet Leigh.

You may think you saw it, but you did not. Your imagination saw it, and that is Hitchcock's great triumph. All the blood we see in the shower is swirling down the drain. *

Psycho has never been shown during prime time as a network movie, but once that forty-five seconds in the shower has been removed, the film could almost be a made-for-TV movie (in content, anyway; in terms of style, it is light-years from the run-of-the-tube TV flick).

In effect, what Hitchcock does is serve us a big raw steak of terror not even a quarter of the way through his film. The rest, even the climax, is really only sizzle. And without that forty-five seconds, the film becomes nearly humdrum. In spite of its reputation, Psycho is an admirably restrained horror movie; Hitchcock even elected to shoot in black and white so that the blood in the shower scene would not look like blood at all, and one oft-told tale-almost surely apocryphal-is that Hitch toyed with shooting the movie in color-except for the shower scene, which would be in black and white.

*I would date the more overtly violent horror movies not from Psycho but from two nonhorror movies, shot in living, bloody color: Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde.

As we enter upon our discussion of horror on television, always keep this fact somewhere near to hand: television has really asked the impossible of its handful of horror programs-to terrify without really terrifying, to horrify without really horrifying, to sell audiences a lot of sizzle and no steak.

Earlier on I said I could rationalize if not excuse the fact of Ellison's TV and my own, and the rationalization goes back to what I've already said about really awful movies. Of course, TV is far too homogenized to cough up anything as charmingly awful as The Giant Spider Invasion with its fur-covered Volkswagen, but every now and then talent shines through and something good turns up . . . and even if the something is not out-and-out good, like Spielberg's Duel or John Carpenter's Someone's Watching Me, the viewer may find at least some cause for hope.

More child than adult in pursuit of his particular taste, hope springs eternal in the breast of the fantasy-horror fan. You tune in, knowing almost certainly that it's going to be bad yet hoping against hope-irrationally-that it is going to be good. Excellence occurs rarely, but every now and then a program will come along which at least bucks the odds enough to produce something interesting, such as the late1979 NBC-TV movie The Aliens Are Coming. Every now and then we are given some cause for hope.

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 (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.

*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.

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 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).

*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.

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.

Dan Curtis went on to make two theatrical films based on the Dark Shadows plot and using its cast of undead characters-such a jump from TV to the movies is not unheard-of (The Lone Ranger is a case where it also happened), but it's rare, and the films, while not great, were certainly viewable. They were done with style, wit, and all those buckets of gore Curtis couldn't use on TV. They were also made with tremendous energy . . . a trait which helped to make The Night Stalker film the highest-rated made-for-TV movie ever telecast up until that time. (It has since been surpassed in the ratings eight or nine times, and one of the films that has outpointed it was the pilot film for-choke!-The Love Boat.) Curtis himself is a remarkable, almost hypnotic man, friendly in a brusque, almost abrasive way, apt to hog the credit for his enterprises, but in such an engaging way that nobody really seems to mind. A throwback to an older and perhaps tougher breed of Hollywood filmmakers, Curtis has never had any noticable problems in deciding where to plant his feet. If he likes you, he stands up for you. If he doesn't, you're a "no-talent sonofabitch" (a phrase that has always pleased me a great deal, and after reading this passage, Curtis may well call me up and use it on me). He would be notable if for no other reason than he may be the only producer in Hollywood effectively able to make a picture as frankly scary as The Night Stalker. The film was scripted by Richard Matheson, who has written for TV with better pace and more dramatic flair than anyone since Reginald Rose, perhaps. Curtis went on to make another picture with Matheson and William F. Nolan which fans still talk about-Trilogy of Terror, with Karen Black.

The segment of this trio of stories most frequently mentioned was the final one, based on Matheson's short story "Prey." In it, Ms. Black gives a tour-de-force solo performance as a woman pursued by a tiny devil-doll with a spear. It is a bloody, gripping, scary fifteen minutes, and it perhaps most clearly sums up what I'm trying to say about Dan Curtis: he has an unerring, crude talent for finding the terror place inside you and squeezing it with a cold hand.

The Night Stalker dealt with a pragmatic reporter named Carl Kolchak who works the Las Vegas beat. Played by Darren McGavin, his face somehow simultaneously tired, awed, cynical, and wiseacre beneath his battered straw fedora, Kolchak is a believable enough character, more Lew Archer than Clark Kent, dedicated above all else to making a buck in Casino City.

He stumbles upon a string of murders that have apparently been committed by a vampire, and follows a series of leads deeper and deeper into the supernatural, engaging at the same time in a war of words with the Powers That Be in Vegas. In the end he tracks the vampire to the old house which has become its abode and drives a stake through its heart. The final twist is predictable but nonetheless satisfying: Kolchak is discredited and fired, cut loose from an establishment that has no room for vampires in either its philosophy or its public relations; he is able to dispatch the bloodsucker (Barry Atwater), but the final victor is Las Vegas boosterism.

McGavin, a talented actor, has rarely been as good-as believable-as he was in The Night Stalker movie.* It is his very pragmatism that enables us to believe in the vampire; if a hardnose like Carl Kolchak can believe it, the film suggests convincingly, then it must be so.

The success of The Night Stalker did not go unnoticed at ABC, which was perennially hit-hungry in those days before Mork, the Fonz, and all those other great characters made their way into the lineup. So a sequel, The Night Strangler, quickly followed. This time the murders were being committed by a doctor who had discovered the secret of eternal life-always provided he could slay five victims every five years or so to make up a new batch of elixir. In this one (set in Seattle), pathologists were covering up the fact that bits of decayed human flesh had been found on the necks of the strangulation victims-the doctor, you see, always began to get a little ripe as his five-year cycle neared its end.

*The part is really only a refinement of the part of David Ross, a private eye McGavin played in a wonderful (if short-lived) NBC series called The Outsider. Probably only the late David Janssen as Harry Orwell and Brian Keith as Lew Archer (in a series that only lasted three weeks-if you blinked, you missed it) can compare with McGavin's performance as a private eye.

Kolchak uncovered the cover-up and tracked the monster to its lair in Seattle's so-called "secret city," an underground section of old Seattle which Matheson visited on a vacation trip in 1970.* And, needless to say, Kolchak managed to dispatch the zombie medico.

ABC decided it wanted to make a series out of Kolchak's continuing adventures, and such a series, predictably titled Kolchak: The Night Stalker, premiered on Friday, September 13th, 1974. The series limped through one season, and it was an abysmal flop. There were production problems from the beginning; Dan Curtis, who had been the guiding force behind the two successful TV-movies, had nothing to do with the series (no one I queried seems to really know why). Matheson, who had written the two original movies, never turned in a single script for the series. Paul Playden, the original producer, resigned his post before the series began its run and was replaced by Cy Chermak. Most of the directors were forgettable; special effects were done on a shoestring. One of my favorite effects, which at least comes close to the fur-covered VW in The Giant Spider Invasion, was on view in an episode entitled "The Spanish Moss Murders." In this one, Richard Kiel-who would become famous as jaws in the last two James Bond pictures-cavorted through a number of Chicago back alleys with a not-very-well-concealed zipper running up the back of his Swamp Monster suit.

*For much of the material on The Night Stalker, I am indebted to Berthe Roeger's comprehensive analysis of both the two movies and the series, published in Fangoria magazine (issue #3, December 1979). The same issue contains an invaluable episode-by-episode chronology of the series' run.

But the basic problem with the Night Stalker series was the problem which dogs any nonanthology series dealing with the supernatural or the occult: a complete breakdown in the ability to suspend disbelief. We could believe Kolchak once, as he tracked the vampire down in Vegas; with some added effort we could even believe in him twice, tracking down the undead doc in Seattle. Once the series got going, it was harder. Kolchak goes out to cover the last cruise of a fine old luxury liner and discovers that one of his fellow passengers is a werewolf.

He sets out to cover an up-and-coming politician's campaign for the Senate and discovers the candidate has sold his soul to the devil (and considering Watergate and Abscam, I hardly find this supernatural or unusual). Kolchak also stumbles across a prehistoric reptile in Chicago's sewer system ("The Sentry"); a succubus ("Legacy of Terror") ; a coven of witches ("The Trevi Collection"); and in one of the most tasteless programs ever done for network TV, a headless motorcyclist ("Chopper" ) . Eventually, suspension of disbelief becomes utterly impossible- even, one suspects, for the production staff, which began to play poor Kolchak more and more for laughs. In a sense, what we saw in this series was a speeded-up version of the Universal Syndrome: from horror to humor. But it took the Universal Pictures monsters some eighteen years to get from one state to the other; it only took The Night Stalker twenty episodes.

As Berthe Roeger points out, Kolchak: The Night Stalker enjoyed a brief and quite successful revival when the series was rerun as part of CBS's late-night program of oldies.

Roeger's conclusion, however, that its success was due to any merit in the series itself seems off the mark to me. If the tune-in was large, I suspect it was for the same reason that the theater always fills up at midnight for Reefer Madness. I've mentioned the siren song of crap before, and here it is again. I suspect that people tuned in once, couldn't believe how bad this thing was, and kept tuning in on successive nights to make sure that their eyes had not deceived them.

They hadn't; perhaps only Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, the launching pad for that apostle of disaster, Irwin Allen, can compete with Kolchak for total collapse. Yet we should remember that not even Seabury Quinn, with his Jules de Grandin series in Weird Tales, was able to keep the continuing-character format rolling very successfully, and Quinn was one of the most talented writers of the pulp era. Kolchak: The Night Stalker (which became known during its run to some pundits as Kolchak's Monster of the Week) nonetheless holds a certain warm spot in my heart-a small warm spot, it is true-and in the hearts of a great many fans.

There is something childlike and unsophisticated in its very awfulness.

5

"There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. It is the dimension of the imagination. It is an area we call . . . The Twilight Zone.” With this rather purple invocation-which did not sound purple at all in Rod Serling's measured and almost matter-of-fact delivery-viewers were invited to enter a queerly boundless other world . . . and enter they did. The Twilight Zone ran on CBS from October of 1959 through the summer of 1965-from the torpor of the Eisenhower administration to LBJ's escalation of American involvement in Vietnam, the first of the long hot summers in American cities, and the advent of the Beatles.

Of all the dramatic programs which have ever run on American TV, it is the one which comes closest to defying any overall analysis. It was not a western or a cop show (although some of the stories had western formats or featured cops 'n' robbers); it was not really a science fiction show (although The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows categorizes it as such); not a sitcom (although some of the episodes were funny) ; not really occult (although it did occult stories frequently-in its own peculiar fashion), not really supernatural. It was its own thing, and in a large part that fact alone seems to account for the fact that a whole generation is able to associate the Serling program with the budding of the sixties . . . at least, as the sixties are remembered.

Rod Serling, the program's creator, came to prominence in what has been referred to as television's "golden age"-although those who have termed it so because they remember fondly such anthology programs as Studio One, Playhouse 90, and Climax have somehow managed to forget such chestnuts as Mr. Arsenic, Hands of Mystery, Doorway to Danger, and Doodle Weaver-programs which ran during the same period, and which by comparison make such current TV programs as Vega$ and That's Incredible! look like great American theater. Television never really has had a golden age; only successive seasons of sounding brass which vary slightly as to the trueness of the tone.

Nevertheless, television has produced isolated spasms of quality, and three of Serling's early teleplays-Patterns, The Comedian, and Requiem for a Heavyweight-form a large part of what television viewers mean when they speak of a "golden age" . . . although Serling was by no means alone. There were others, including Paddy Chayefsky (Marty) and Reginald Rose (Twelve Angry Men) who contributed to that illusion of gold.

Serling was the son of a Binghamton, New York, butcher, a Golden Gloves champ (at approximately five feet four, Serling's class was flyweight), and a paratrooper during World War II. He began to write (unsuccessfully) in college and went on to write (unsuccessfully) for a radio station in Cincinnati. "That experience proved frustrating," Ed Naha relates in his fond reprise of Serling's career. "His introspective characters came under attack by . . . executives who wanted their `people to get their teeth into the soil'! Serling recalled the period years later: `What those guys wanted wasn't a writer, but a plow.' " *

Serling quit radio and began to freelance. His first success came in 1955 (Patterns, starring Van Heflin and Everett Sloane, the story of a dirty corporate power play and the resulting moral squeeze on one executive-the teleplay won Serling his first Emmy), and he never looked back . . . but he somehow never really moved on, either. He wrote a number of feature films- Assault on a Queen was maybe the worst of them; Planet of the Apes and Seven Day in May were two of the good ones-but television was his home, and Serling never really outgrew it, as did Chayefsky (Hospital, Network). Television was his home, where he lived most comfortably, and after a five-year hiatus following the cancellation of The Twilight Zone, he turned up on the tube again, this time as the host of Night Gallery. Serling himself expressed feelings of doubt and depression about his deep involvement in this mediocre medium. "But God knows," he said in his last interview, "when I look back over thirty years of professional writing, I'm hard-pressed to come up with anything that's important. Some things are literate, some things are interesting, some things are classy, but very damn little is important." **

Serling apparently saw The Twilight Zone as a way of going underground and keeping his ideals alive in television following the cancellation of the prestige drama programs in the late fifties and early sixties. And to an extent, I suppose he succeeded. Under the comforting guise of "it's only make-believe," The Twilight Zone was able to deal with questions of fascism ("He Lives," starring Dennis Hopper as a young neo-Nazi guided by the shadowy figure of Adolf Hitler), ugly mass hysteria ("The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street"), and even Joseph Conrad's heart of darkness-rarely has any television program dared to present human nature in such an ugly, revealing light as that used in "The Shelter," in which a number of suburban neighbors along Your Street, U.S.A., are reduced to animals squabbling over a fallout shelter during a nuclear crisis.

*For this and much of the material on Serling and The Twilight Zone, I'm indebted to "Rod Serling's Dream," by Ed Naha, published in Starlog #15 (August 1978), and to Gary Gerani, who compiled the complete episode guide in the same issue.

**Quoted in an interview conducted by Linda Brevelle shortly before Serling's death and published under the title, "Rod Serling's Last Interview" (a rather ghoulish title, I think, but then, what do I know?), in the 1976 Writer' Yearbook.

Other episodes generated a kind of existential weirdness that no other series has been able to match. There was, for instance, "Time Enough at Last," starring Burgess Meredith* as a myopic bank clerk who can never find time enough to read. He survives an H-bomb attack, in fact, because he is reading in the vault when the bombs fall. Meredith is delighted with the holocaust; he finally has all the time to read that a man could want. Unfortunately, he breaks his glasses shortly after reaching the library. One of the guiding moral precepts of The Twilight Zone seems to have been that a little irony is good for your blood.

If The Twilight Zone had bowed on TV as we have found it in the period 1976-1980, it would have undoubtedly disappeared after an initial run of six to nine episodes. Its ratings were low to begin with . . . like in the cellar. It was up against a fairly popular Robert Taylor cops 'n’ robbers meller, The Detectives, on ABC, and the immensely popular Gillette Cavalcade of Sports on NBC-this was the show that invited you to put your feet up and watch such fighters as Carmen Basilio and Sugar Ray Robinson get their faces changed.

But television moved more slowly in those days, and scheduling was less anarchistic. The Twilight Zone's first season consisted of thirty-six half-hour episodes, and by the season's midpoint the ratings had begun to pick up, helped by good word-of-mouth and glowing reviews.

The reviews played their part by helping CBS decide that they had that potentially valuable commodity, a "prestige program." ** Nevertheless, problems continued. The program had problems finding a steady sponsor (this was back in the days, you must remember, when dinosaurs walked the earth and TV time was cheap enough to allow a single sponsor to pay for an entire program-hence GE Theater, Alcoa Playhouse, The Voice of Firestone, The Lux Show, Coke Time, and a host of others; to this writer's knowledge, the last program to be wholly sponsored by one company was Bonanza, sponsored by GM), and CBS began to wake up to the fact that Sterling had put none of his cudgels away but was now wielding them in the name of fantasy.

*Meredith became perhaps the most familiar face of all to Twilight Zone fans, save for Serling's own. Probably his best-remembered role came in "Printer's Devil," where he plays a newspaper owner who is really Satan . . . complete with a jutting, crooked cigar that was somehow diabolical.

**In 1972 CBS discovered another "prestige program"-The Waltons, created by Earl Hamner, Jr., who wrote a good many Twilight Zones . . . including, coincidentally, "The Bewitchin' Pool," the last original Twilight Zone episode to be telecast on the network. Placed against brutal competition-NBC's The Flip Wilson Show and ABC's own version of The Church of What's Happening Now, The Mod Squad-CBS stuck with Hamner's creation in spite of the low ratings because of the prestige factor. The Waltons went on to outlive its competition and at this writing has run seven seasons.

During that first season, The Twilight Zone presented "Perchance to Dream," the late Charles Beaumont's first contribution to the series, and "Third from the Sun," by Richard Matheson. The gimmick of the latter-that the group of protagonists is fleeing not from Earth but to it-is one that has been utterly beaten to death by now (most notably by that deep-space turkey Battlestar Galactica), but most viewers can remember the snap of that ending to this day. It was the episode which marks the point at which many occasional tuners-in became addicts. Here, for once, was something Completely New and Different.

During its third season, The Twilight Zone was either canceled (Serling's version) or squeezed out by insoluble scheduling problems (the CBS version). In either case, it returned the following year as an hourlong program. In his article "Rod Serling's Dream," Ed Naha says: "The 'something different' the elongated (Twilight Zone) came up with turned out to be boredom. After thirteen publicly shunned episodes, the 60-minute Twilight Zone was canceled.” It was indeed canceled-only to return for a final, mostly dull, season as a half-hour show again-but because of boredom? In my own view, the hour-long episodes of The Twilight Zone included some of the best of the entire run. There was "The Thirty-Fathom Grave," in which the crew of a Navy destroyer hears ghosts tapping inside a sunken submarine; "Printer's Devil"; "The New Exhibit" (one of The Twilight Zone's few excursions into outright horror, this dealt with a wax museum janitor played by Martin Balsam who discovers that the Murderers' Row exhibit has come to life); and "Miniature," which starred Robert Duvall in a Charles Beaumont script about a man who escapes back into the gay nineties. , As Naha points out, by its final season "no one at CBS really cared about the series." He goes on to say that ABC, which had had some success with The Outer Limits, extended feelers to Serling about doing a sixth season with them. Serling refused. "I think ABC wanted to make a trip to the graveyard every week," he said.

For Serling, life was never quite the same. The angry young man who had written Patterns began doing television commercials-that unmistakable voice could be heard huckstering tires and cold remedies in a bizarre turn that recalls the broken fighter in Requiem for a Heavyweight who ends up performing in fixed wrestling matches. And in 1970 lie began making that "trip to the graveyard every week," not on ABC but on NBC, as host and sometime writer of Night Gallery. The series was inevitably compared to The Twilight Zone in spite of the fact that Gallery was really a watered-down Thriller with Serling doing the Boris Karloff hosting job.

Serling had none of the creative control he had enjoyed while doing The Twilight Zone. (He complained at one point that the studio was trying to turn Night Gallery "into Mannix with a shroud.") Nonetheless, Night Gallery produced a number of interesting episodes, including adaptations of H. P. Lovecraft's "Cool Air" and "Pickman's Model." It also presented an episode which must rate as one of the most frightening ever telecast on TV. "Boomerang," based on a story by Oscar Cook, dealt with a little bug called an earwig. The earwig is placed in the villain's ear and began to-ulp!-chew its way through his brain, leaving the man in an excruciating, sweaty state of agony (the physiological reason for this, since the brain has no nerves, is never explained). He is told there's only one chance in a billion that the pesky little beast will actually chew on a straight course across to his other ear and thus find the exit; much more likely is the possibility that it will just continue chewing its way around in there until the fellow goes mad . . . or commits suicide. The viewer is immensely relieved when the nearimpossible happens and the earwig actually does come out the other side . . . and then, the kicker comes: the earwig was female. And it laid eggs in there. Millions of them.

Most Night Gallery episodes were nowhere near as chilling, and the series was canceled after limping along in one form or another for three labored years. It was Serling's last star turn.

"On his fortieth birthday," Naha says, "Serling made his first parachute jump since World War II." Serling's reason? "I did it," he said, "to prove that I wasn't old." But he looked old; a comparison of his early Twilight Zone publicity photos and those taken on the Night Gallery set before those mostly idiotic paintings shows a change which is nearly shocking. Serling's face had become lined, his neck wattled; it is the face of a man who has been partially dissolved in television's vitriol. In 7972 he received an interviewer in his study, which was lined with framed reviews of Requiem, Patterns, and other teleplays from the early days.

"Sometimes I come in here just to look," he said. "I haven't had reviews like that in years.

Now I know why people keep scrapbooks-just to prove to themselves it really happened.” The man who jumped from a plane on his fortieth birthday to prove to himself that he wasn't old refers to himself constantly as old in the Linda Brevelle interview some nine years later; she characterizes him as "vibrant and alive" during their meeting at La Taverna, Serling's favorite L.A. watering hole, but again and again those disquieting phrases crop up; at one point he says, "I'm not an old man yet, but I'm not a young man, either"; at another he says he is an old man. Why didn't he get out of the creative demo derby? At the end of Requiem for a Heavyweight, Jack Palance says he must go back into the ring-even though the whole thing is fixed-because the ring is all he knows. It's as good an answer as any.

Serling, a fierce workaholic who sometimes smoked four packs of cigarettes a day, suffered a crippling heart attack in 1975 and died following open-heart surgery. His legacy consisted of a few fine early plays and The Twilight Zone, a series which has become one of those peculiar TV legends, like The Fugitive and Wanted: Dead or Alive. What are we to make of this program which is so revered (by people who were mostly children when they originally viewed it) ? "I guess a third of the shows were pretty damned good," Serling told an interviewer.

"Another third would have been passable. Another third are dogs.” The fact is that Serling himself wrote sixty-two of the first ninety-two Twilight Zones typing them, dictating them to a secretary, talking them into a dictaphone-and, of course, smoking nonstop. Fantasy fans will recognize the names of almost all the other writers, those who contributed the other thirty episodes: Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, George Clayton Johnson, Earl Hamner, Jr., Robert Presnell, E. Jack Neuman, Montgomery Pittman, and Ray Bradbury.* The simple fact is that most of the bow-wows which escaped the kennel had Serling's name on them. They include "Mr. Denton on Doomsday," "The SixteenMillimeter Shrine," "Judgment Night," "The Big Tall Wish" (a shameless tear-jerker about a kid who helps a broken-down pug win his last match), and too many others for me to want to mention.

Even the recollection most people seem to have of The Twilight Zone has always bothered me; it is the concluding "twists" that most people seem to remember, but the show's actual success seemed to be based on more solid concepts, concepts which form a vital link between the old pulp fiction predating the fifties (or those Thriller programs which used the pulps as the basis of their best stories) and the "new" literature of horror and fantasy. Week after week, The Twilight Zone presented ordinary people in extraordinary situations, people who had somehow turned sideways and slipped through a crack in reality . . . and thus into Serling's "zone." It is a powerful concept, and surely the clearest road into the land of fantasy for viewers and readers who do not ordinarily care to visit that land. But the concept was by no means original with Serling; Ray Bradbury had begun putting the ordinary and the horrible cheek-by-jowl in the forties, and when he began to move on into more arcane lands and to use the language in more and more novel ways, Jack Finney came upon the scene and began refining the same extraordinary-in-the-ordinary themes. In a benchmark collection of short stories called The Third Level, the literary equivalent of those startling Magritte paintings where railroad trains are roaring out of fireplaces or those Dali paintings where clocks are lying limply over the branches of trees, Finney actually defined the boundaries of Serling's Twilight Zone. In the lead story, Finney tells of a man who finds a mythical third level to Grand Central Station (which only has two concourse levels, for those of you who aren't familiar with that neat old building). The third level is a kind of way station in time, giving egress on a happier, simpler time (those same late 1800's which so many put-upon Twilight Zone heroes escaped into, and essentially the same period Finney himself returns to in his celebrated novel, Time and Again).

*Bradbury adapted his own short story, "I Sing the Body Electric," for the program. It is, to the best of my knowledge, Bradbury's only screen credit following an odd but rather magnificent adaptation of Melville's Moby Dick for the John Huston film.

In many ways, Finney's third level satisfies all the definitions of Serling's Twilight Zone, and in many ways it was Finney's concept that made Serling's concept possible. One of Finney's great abilities as a writer has been his talent for allowing his stories to slip unobtrusively, almost casually, across the line and into another world . . . as when a character, picking through his change, happens upon a dime which bears not the likeness of FDR but of Woodrow Wilson, or when another Finney character begins on a journey to the idyllic planet Verna as a passenger aboard a rickety old charter bus that is eventually parked in a tumbledown country barn ("Of Missing Persons"). Finney's most important accomplishment, which the best episodes of The Twilight Zone echo (and which the best of the post-Zone writers of fantasy have also echoed), is that Daliesque ability to create the fantasy . . . and then not apologize for it or explain it. It simply hangs there, fascinating and a little sickening, a mirage too real to dismiss: a brick floating over a refrigerator, a man eating a TV dinner full of eyeballs, kids on a toylittered floor playing with their pet dinosaur. If the fantasy seems real enough, Finney insisted, and Serling after him, we don't need any wires or mirrors. It was, in a large part, Finney and Serling who finally answered H. P. Lovecraft, who showed a new direction. For me and those of my generation, the answer was like a thunderclap of revelation, opening a million entrancing possibilities.

And yet Finney, who perhaps understood Serling's concept of "that middle ground between light and shadow" better than anyone else, was never represented on The Twilight Zone-not as a scriptwriter, not as a source. Serling later adapted Assault on a Queen (1966) , a work which can most humanely be characterized as unfortunate. It contains all the preachy, talking-heads stuff that brought so many of his Twilight Zone scripts low. It's one of the minor tragedies of the field that what might have been an inspired meeting of two like minds should have turned out so poorly. But if you feel disappointed with my analysis of The Twilight Zone (and some, I suspect, may feel that I have spat on an icon), I urge you to find a copy of Finney's The Third Level, which will show you what The Twilight Zone could have been.

And still, the program left us with a number of powerful memories, and Serling's analysis that a third of the shows were pretty damn good may not have been far from the mark. Anyone who watched the show regularly can remember William Shatner, held in thrall by a penny fortune-telling machine in a cheesy restaurant located in a one-stoplight town ("Nick of Time"); Everett Sloane succumbing to gambling mania in "The Fever," and the hoarse, metallic cry of the coins ("Fraa-aaanklin!") calling him back to do battle with the diabolical slot-machine; the beautiful woman who is reviled for her ugliness in a world of piglike humanoids (Donna Douglas of The Beverly Hillbillies in "Eye of the Beholder"). And, of course, those two classics by Richard Matheson, "The Invaders" (starring a grimly brilliant Agnes Moorhead as a country woman fighting off tiny invaders from space, a story which foreshadows Matheson's later treatment of a similar subject in "Prey") and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," in which William Shatner plays a newly recovered mental patient who sees an evil-looking gremlin pulling at the housing of an airliner's motor.

The Twilight Zone also showcased a wide range of performers (Ed Wynn, Kennan Wynn, Buster Keaton, Jack Klugman, Franchot Tone, Art Carney, Pippa Scott, Robert Redford, and Cloris Leachman among others), writers, and directors (Buzz Kulik, Stuart Rosenberg, and Ted Post, to name a few). It frequently featured startling and exciting music by the late Bernard Herrmann; the best special effects were done by William Tuttle, probably only second to Dick Smith (or the new makeup genius, Tom Savini) in wizardry.

It was a pretty good show, the way the most fondly remembered TV series are pretty good shows . . . but ultimately, no better. TV is the endless gobbler of talent, something new and poisonous under the sun, and if Zone is ultimately weaker than our fond memories of it would like to allow, the fault lies not with Serling but with TV itself-the hungry maw, the bottomless pit of shit. Serling wrote a total of eighty-four episodes, something like 2,200 pages of script according to the screenwriter's rule of thumb that one page of script equals one minute of video. This is a staggering pile of work, and it really isn't surprising that the all-too-occasional clunker like "I Am the Night-Color Me Black" got through. Rod Serling was only able to do so much in the name of Kimberly-Clark and Chesterfield Kings. Then television ate him up.

6

And as far as TV is concerned, I guess it's time for everybody to get out of the pool. I don't have enough John Simon in me to really enjoy shooting TV's creative cripples as they crawl and squirm around in the great TV Cancellation Corral. I've even tried to treat Kolchak: The Night Stalker with affection, because I certainly feel a degree of affection for it. Bad as it was, it wasn't any worse than some of the Saturday matinee creature-features that enlivened my life as a kid-The Black Scorpion or The Beast of Hollow Mountain, for instance.

Individual TV programs have produced brilliant or near-brilliant excursions into the supernatural-Alfred Hitchcock Presents, for instance, gave us adaptations of several Ray Bradbury stories (the best of them was probably "The Jar"), one terrifying William Hope Hodgson story, "The Thing in the Weeds," a nonsupernatural bone-freezer from the pen of John D. MacDonald ("The Morning After"), and fans of the bizarre will remember the episode where the cops ate the murder weapon-a leg of lamb . . . . that one based on a story by Roald Dahl.

There was "They're Coming," the original hour-long pilot for The Twilight Zone, and the short French film "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," which appeared on American television for the first time as a Twilight Zone episode (this adaptation of the Bierce story cannot be seen during syndication runs of The Twilight Zone). Another Bierce story, "One of the Missing," ran on PBS in the winter of 1979. And speaking of PBS, there was also an interesting adaptation of Dracula done there. Originally telecast in 1977, it featured Louis Jourdan as the legendary Count. This videotaped drama is both moody and romantic; Jourdan gives a more effective performance than Frank Langella in the John Badham film, and the scenes of Dracula crawling down the wall of his castle are marvelous. The Jourdan version also comes closer to the heart of the vampire's sexuality, presenting to us in Lucy, the three weird sisters, and in Dracula himself creatures who possess a loveless sexuality-one which kills. It is more powerful than the hohum romance of the Badham version, in spite of Langella's energetic job in the title role.

Jack Palance has also played Dracula on television (in another Matheson screenplay and another Dan Curtis production) and did quite well by the Count . . . although I prefer Jourdan's performance.

Other one-shot TV movies and specials run from the merely forgettable (NBC's ill-advised adaptation of Thomas Tryon's Harvest Home, for instance) to some really hideous pieces of work: Cornel Wilde in Gargoyles (Bernie Casey plays the head gargoyle as a kind of fivethousand-year-old Ayatollah Khomeini) and Michael Sarrazin is the mistitled-and misbegotten-Frankenstein: The True Story. The risk rate is so high that when my own novel 'Salem's Lot was adapted for television after Warners had tried fruitlessly to get it off the ground as a theatrical film for three years, my feeling at its generally favorable reception was mostly relief. For awhile it seemed that NBC might turn it into a weekly series, and when that rather numbing prospect passed by the boards, I felt relief again.

Most television series have ranged from the ludicrous (Land of the Giants) to the utterly inane (The Munsters, Struck by Lightning). The anthology series of the last ten years have meant well, by and large, but have been emasculated by pressure groups both without and within; they have been sacrificed on the altar of television's apparent belief that both drama and melodrama are best appreciated while in a semidoze. There was Journey to the Unknown, a British import (from the Hammer studios). Some of the stories were engrossing, but ABC made it clear rather quickly that it had no real interest in frightening anyone, and the series died quickly. Tales of the Unexpected, produced by Quinn Martin (The FBI, The Fugitive, The Invaders, The New Breed, and God knows how many others), was more interesting, concentrating on psychological horrors (in one episode, reminiscent of Anne Rivers Siddons's The House Next Door, a murderer sees his victim rise from the dead on his television set), but low ratings killed the program after a short run . . . a fate that might have been The Twilight Zone's, had not the network stuck by it.

In fine, the history of horror and fantasy on television is a short and tacky one. Let's turn the magic eye off and turn to the bookshelf; I want us to talk about some stories where all the artificial boundaries are removed-both those of visual set and of network restriction-and the author is free to "get you" in any way he can. An uneasy concept, and some of these books scared the hell out of me even as they were delighting me. Maybe you've had the same experience . . . or maybe you will.

Just take my arm and step this way.