Writing by Jamie Evans

Tag: Classic television

  • Stuff I Have Been Enjoying: The Armchair Edition

    I don’t actually have an armchair, but never mind about that. In between being distracted by work, life, and so on, I usually keep a rolling programme of television going, but not of the live broadcast category. In fact, many of the creators, crew and stars of the programmes are very much dead. What, I hear you cry, has been on rotation? Let me keep you in suspense no longer.

    A Dan Curtis Production

    Barnabas Collins and cobwebs in a Dark Shadows promo shot

    Pretty much always in play is Dark Shadows (1966-1971), the daytime Gothic drama that turned sixty this year. At the moment, I’m into the aftermath of Barnabas’ kidnap of Maggie Evans, with recent episode 265 finding Joe and Sam visiting her at the sanitarium. We’re introduced to Dr Julia Hoffman (“Doc-tor Hoff-man, Doc-tor Hoff-man”), played by the incredible, Oscar-nominated, Grayson Hall and her fearsome range of expressions. So begins a new chapter for the show, and one of maybe-possibly-definitely the strangest, most beguiling, wildest performances in television history. The episode itself is great, the series – still a daytime show, so still often people talking – on newly firm Gothic footing. A thousand-plus episodes is a huge commitment but if you haven’t yet enjoyed Dark Shadows, I do recommend it unreservedly.

    Tangentially Curtis

    Kolchak and grizzly chum

    I’ve written elsewhere about how Darren McGavin as Carl Kolchak is one of the great marriages of actor and character. Compared to his first two outings in the Curtis-produced television movies, the series that followed (Kolchak: The Night Stalker, 1974-1975) is a mess. Low budgets, late rewrites, McGavin’s fatigue and dissatisfaction, and a punishing schedule did it no favours. And yet, as we know from its influence on Chris Carter and it’s continuing popularity through books, graphic novels, recent-ish Blu-ray releases, and rumours of reboots, something worked about it, and it was not only McGavin. For me, the monster-of-the-week format doesn’t rely on the same old ‘classic’ threats, with imaginative creatures, the writing is – perhaps against the odds – reliably solid, and the feel of the show is consistent. ‘Demon in Lace’ (episode 16 of 20) finds a succubus possessing recently deceased women and feeding on college students. It’s fun, as is the series, and though by no means the best horror television you’ll see, a reliably good time.

    A Circular Hell

    Rene Auberjonois as Sharsted

    When speaking of erratically successful horror television plagued by production problems, Night Gallery (1970-1973) is never far away. But when this series is successful, it soars. This brings us to the Rod Serling-written and John Badham-directed adaptation of Basil Copper’s short story ‘Camera Obscura’, from season two. It tells of a moneylender, Sharsted, played superbly well by Rene Auberjonois, lured to the home of a ‘client’, Mr Gingold, played with a strange menace by Ross Martin. Gingold is furious that Sharsted’s unrelenting business has driven a friend of his to an early grave. He also has a camera he’d like to show Sharsted, a very special camera, that can see the past, and can see into other hidden places. Auberjonois’ repeated, sneering use of “Mr Gingold!” reminds of the pilot film and Roddy McDowall’s “Portifoy!” and its low budget works as an advantage, the chilly, half-empty final sequence a remarkable, unsettling exploration of a very personal hell.

    One More Step Into The Beyond, Dear Friends

    John Newland introducing One Step Beyond

    By most of the way through season two, my beloved John Newland’s One Step Beyond (1959-1961) answers the question of just how many times can there be an episode where a psychic connection may reveal or prevent a murder. That answer is never enough, and episode 35, ‘Contact’, finds the gift of a pocket watch tormenting a mild-mannered, loving husband with misogynistic thoughts of murdering his wife. Only, it’s not his wife, nor are they his thoughts. Can he figure out who the watch originally belonged to in time to stop the crime happening? It’s a familiar theme and story for the show, but as always, Newland’s steady hand creatively, as director, and as presenter means this was a good episode. As for mixing things up, in the third season, a late run of episodes produced at MGM Studios in Borehamwood brings us the likes of Roger Delgado, André Morell, and Christopher Lee as guest stars (that’s after the Charles Bronson episode).

    Seeing Seeing Things

    A screen grab of a shitty Seeing Things ‘poster’ because there’s almost nothing proper out there

    I’ve also enjoyed the start of Seeing Things (1981-1987), a comedy-thriller series with a supernatural twist from Canada in which grumpy and pushy but not without charm news reporter Louis (played by co-creator Louis Del Grande) starts receiving visions of crimes, often at odds with what the police or courts say are the facts of a case. Being a bit of an asshole but also, importantly, a good journalist, Louis is compelled to uncover the truth and reveal the real guilty party. Louis has some crossover with Kolchak, in that neither spends much time questioning the why or wherefore of their supernatural experiences, instead doggedly chasing the truth even when it puts them in danger. It’s so far a fun, entertaining series with some good writing, believable characters and solid storytelling.

    Law & Order: Oh Boy That’s Bleak

    The season one cast of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit looking chipper and upbeat

    I’ve been revisiting the first season of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (1999-present, shortened to SVU) alongside the current season, because apparently, I want to be confronted with deeply unpleasant cases and a team of detectives most often found circling the drain of unrecoverable moral injury. Now, the original ripped-from-the-headlines Law & Order was never anyone’s idea of a good time, despite being compelling. Given SVU is still a current series, into its 27th season at the time of writing, and approaching 600 episodes, you would be forgiven for thinking perhaps it has settled into a comfortable rut. However, it started out miserable and confrontational and continues in that fashion today. The largest difference is that Mariska Hargitay and the various production teams have over the years ensured it is grounded in some of the theories and support that guide the real life work of police doing this job. Season one, meanwhile, was scrappier, and more blunt in its treatment of the cases and the detectives investigating the crimes. Both versions are compelling and often gripping, and also interesting simply because how many times do we get to compare a series, and a central character and performance, separated by more than a quarter of a century.

    Farscaping, Across the Universe

    The season one Farscape cast looking miserable…oh no wait, they’re chipper and upbeat.

    Magnitudes more actual fun has been a revisit to the first season of Farscape (1999-2004). Plots-wise, it’s the usual television science-fiction stuff, hopping from planet to planet via stories that had been broadly seen before on the likes of various iterations of Star Trek. Set-up and character-wise, however, it is very different. An American-Australian co-production, it follows a US astronaut who, after travelling through a wormhole, finds himself impossibly far away from home. He finds himself on a living ship, on the run from a fascist-vibes space army and vengeful captain, home to other escaped prisoners, forming an accidental and untrusting crew. Also involved with the production is Brian Henson and The Jim Henson Company, so unlike other shows that put a ridged nose and swipe of blue paint on an actor’s face and call them an ‘alien’, Farscape is full of imaginative muppet-adjacent creatures, not least Rygel, one of the central characters, who becomes as real as anyone else. As the show progresses, its sense of anarchy, both in humour and drama, takes it to some very dark places. In its early days however, it’s an agreeably weird, offbeat science-fiction series that tries something different.

    But Wait, Don’t You Watch ANYTHING Made This Century?

    Yes, I do, on occasion. We’ll quickly step over Widow’s Bay (2026-present), a series I was pleased to observe many people fall in love with. I, however, did not, finding it worked well as a comedy but very much did not as a horror. Still, I am glad to hear it will be coming back, so maybe next time, I will also become smitten. A horror series with hefty doses of black comedy that does work for me that I am nearly through with is Evil (2019-2024), which – similarly to Farscape – becomes more throughly unhinged with each new season. Series I have Quite Enjoyed include Best Medicine (2026-present, the US adaptation of Doc Martin) and CIA (2026-present, generic FBI spin-off from the Dick Wolf stable of ‘what if we used different letters for the title but broadly made the same show over and over again’). And after a third season that often circled being A Bit Shit, the fourth go round for Reacher (2022-present) has rediscovered everything that made the series good, and keeps giving Alan Ritchson lots of things to hit and get hit by.

    Like a good sitcom, or a lovingly made soap opera, one of television – and life’s – joys is a good procedural/detective show done well. There’s a reason these types of series get commissioned again and again. They may not be the most creative or satisfying meal you ever have, but they are reliably satiating.

    Promo image for Saint-Pierre

    One such series is Saint-Pierre (2025-present), a Canadian detective drama about a big-city police officer, Fitz, (Allan Hawco, a kind of modern Paul Gross, a one-person Canadian creative cottage industry) banished for indiscretion to the titular French collectivity of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon. There’s no quiet licking of wounds however, as with new partner Arch he is soon dealing with a number of crimes, ranging from murder to James Purefoy’s mind-boggling Irish ‘accent’ as series one villain Sean Gallagher. It’s a beautiful part of the world, so the series dresses itself, and ticks along as an unambitious but entertaining diversion.

    Mark Gatiss as Mr Book in his book store surrounded by books, because Bookish, get it?

    Recent weeks witnessed the return of Mark Gatiss and Matthew Sweet’s Bookish (2025-present). I wasn’t the biggest fan of its first season. An old friend once described their frustration with something that ‘went around the houses to cross the street’ and that was my feeling on its opening season, which had its charms but also lingered too long in its missteps. While its second season still gives way too often to some of the worst instincts of Gatiss, et al (but fortunately never as much as his instalments of A Ghost Story for Christmas) this run of episodes has tighter writing, a solid, settled and appealing central group of characters, and enough intrigue in each case and its continuing plot lines to qualify as a big step forward. While it might appear ‘cosy crime’ at first, it also has a flinty, brave edge to characters and stories that is well done. And it’s got Polly Walker in a lead role, which is always a good thing. I’m glad it came back stronger, and that there will be a Christmas special and third season to follow.

    There’s other shows that I haven’t even mentioned in the rotation, from The Andy Griffith Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show to Upstairs, Downstairs, to Take the High Road being added episode by episode to YouTube (!!), but we can save them for another time.

  • Hot film (and book, and TV show) summer

    The films, books and television I’ve been enjoying in recent months

    I haven’t done one of these in a while, mostly because life finds a way (to get in the way) and, like everyone else in the UK, I have been melting, I’m melting etc, etc. So, like a YouTuber who says things like ‘Without further ado, let’s get started’ after ado-ing the ever-loving fuck out of things, let’s…uh…get started.

    Films

    Casablanca (1942, dir. Michael Curtiz)

    Poster for Casablanca

    I had never seen Casablanca until earlier this year. That’s mostly because I have VERY SPECIFIC INTERESTS due to reasons, and the film studies course I did at university was, possibly, shit. Casablanca is one of those oft-parodied, baked into popular culture classics it’s easy to feel like you have seen before you get to it.

    That’s never really true, and our familiarity with iconic scenes or pastiches can’t obscure the merits of something truly brilliant. That something is a thrilling, romantic, funny, beautifully shot ensemble tale of cynic-with-a-lover’s-heart Rick finding his passion for life again.

    The truth of filmmaking is no matter the talent involved, it is hard work, a good outcome often more by serendipity than by design. So it is to a degree here, but you also get a script, performances and creative team fully able to capture that accidental alchemy.

    Behind the Door (1919, dir. Irvin Willat)

    Poster for Behind the Door

    Behind the Door is an adaptation of a Gouverneur Morris short story. A mostly fine WW1-time drama of a couple struggling to stay together despite prejudice and duty, it does that silent-era thing of taking a wild pivot into a stunningly unpleasant last 20 minutes that is still shocking.

    It’s reliably, occasionally excitingly directed, and works as laying groundwork for later fucked-up Morris adaptations featuring Lon Chaney, notably the following year’s The Penalty. One-time screen Dr Jekyll, Hobart Bosworth, does good work as its tortured ‘hero’. Glad this one was restored as much as could be. That last quarter though, hoo boy. It’s a film worth watching for the ending alone, warped reels of cinema.

    The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre (1964, dir. Joseph Stefano)

    Poster for The Ghost of Sierra De Cobre

    Psycho and The Outer Limits writer Joseph Stefano also produced and directed this 1964 film for a sadly never-to-be series about hauntings (with this film expanded from its initial 50-min runtime). At least we have this slice of weirdness, as Martin Landau’s investigator tries to unravel if a wealthy man is really getting phone calls from his dead mother.

    Allegedly shelved as ‘too scary for TV, it’s ponderous and shows its television scale, but is also frequently excellent, with some proper scares and control of its mood. Shot almost like an art film, one easy to imagine without any dialogue, it’s often beautiful. Equally dreamlike and nightmarish, this one is recommended for fans of offbeat horror. As an unusually serious, strange film, it deserves to take its place as a minor haunted house classic.

    One Night in the Tropics (1940, dir. A. Edward Sutherland)

    Poster for One Night in the Tropics

    Abbott & Costello make their film debut as side characters in a romantic comedy musical(ish). The film itself is fine, good natured and as entertaining as it sets out to be (mildly). The key reason to watch it for me was the first opportunity for Bud and Lou to brush everyone else aside when onscreen.

    They bring energy, timing, and a sense of the absurd to what is otherwise a pretty inoffensively beige romantic comedy of errors. As with Casablanca, you could easily think familiarity with them and their routines would dull the impact, but they are magnificently weird, anxiously anarchic, and worth it every time they appear.

    Murder in Coweta County (1983, dir. Gary Nelson)

    Newspaper advert for Murder in Coweta County

    This is the television movie as genuinely extraordinary experience. At first look, we have a dour based-on-a-true-story procedural in which Andy Griffith inverts his sitcom persona to play the dark-hearted opposite. 

    Here, his fantastically arrogant, racist landowner and king of everything in his domain crosses paths with a neighbouring county’s indefatigably moral sheriff, Johnny Cash, over a matter of murder. Griffith can’t even conceive of his charmed life coming undone, Cash won’t let death – murder – go unpunished.

    A blunt, basic script makes room for excellent performances, including an extended cameo from June Carter Cash as a fortune teller, a surprising vein of pitch black comedy, and an almost magical, unreal approach to events that feels like a child’s fairytale version of a crime story.

    There are moments in it that play like a rural horror, or other times a rural fantasy. And those final few minutes are unsettling and strangely upsetting. It’s not all great, being an unambitious television production, but unexpected, occasional moments of visual beauty offset a mostly functional directional style. Mostly very good, and always interesting.

    House of Dark Shadows (1970, dir. Dan Curtis)

    Poster for House of Dark Shadows

    When I first watched House of Dark Shadows, I was not particularly taken with it. Having enjoyed the slow burn of Barnabas’ arrival in the series, the film seemed like an inelegant rush job. It is borderline incoherent for anyone new to the story. The other side of this is that it’s a bloody treat for those familiar with the show. From its opening sequences, the film is gloriously unhinged. The beautiful production design makes it look expensive enough, but the way it is made frequently comes across as if it was shot on the manic fly in 48hrs.

    It is in fact the defined and chosen differences to the series, and going all in on copious amounts of blood, that make it a delight. We are given messy fun in which almost everyone dies. You don’t need to know the series, of course, you just need to go along with it. Each time I revisit the film, to me, it feels like an American attempt to make a version of a gonzo European horror of the time. A horny (despite almost no flesh on display), violent, and mean good time.

    He Who Gets Slapped (1924, dir. Victor Sjöström)

    Advert for He Who Gets Slapped

    Taking the opportunity to fill in more of my Lon Chaney filmography, I was glad to go with He Who Gets Slapped. It’s the wilfully weird tale of a scientist betrayed by his benefactor and his wife finding a new home in a circus as a clown who gets slapped, until the unlikely opportunity for revenge presents itself.

    An outstandingly good, expressive Chaney is at times heartbreaking and others unnerving as a man pushed beyond what he can take when the past won’t leave him be. Thematically very grim, it’s a curious mix of melancholy, fury and thwarted ambition and love, juxtaposing moments of hope and darkness until a disturbing, grotesque, ultimately sad final reel.

    Books

    Running the Light

    Cover of Running the Light

    Comedian Sam Tallent’s debut novel tracks a week in the life of stand-up comic and barely living void of drugs, booze, fighting and fucking, Billy Ray Schafer. Schafer used to be somebody in the latter part of the 20th century, until his lying, cheating, ways burned up his marriage, his relationship with his children, and exhausted goodwill in his career. The book finds him criss-crossing America, playing shows after vomiting ducks or to cultish cowboys, his self-medication with alcohol and cocaine rapidly growing into a major problem.

    At the same time, something is gnawing at Billy, pushing him to try and make things right with his now-grownup sons and the wife he betrayed. Tallent is great at a random line of poetry jumping out at you, the characterisations of the inhabitants of an unseen America only road features really get to experience vivid, and in painting an uncompromisingly uncomfortable portrait of a man doing his dammdest to bring about his own demise. Schafer is a bottomless pit of depravity that Tallent manages to make you care about.

    It’s not perfect, and I wasn’t a big fan of its final page, but the journey to get there is full of so much happening, beautifully wrought by Tallent, that the journey is more than worth it.

    Love in the Afternoon, and Evening

    Cover of Love in the Afternoon, and Evening

    Charlotte Druckman and Mayukh Sen join forces for a personal, selective journey through what has made American soap opera so appealing to so many over the decades. Comprised of interviews, chapters on fashion in soaps and their designers, a little on the history of essential creators and writers like Irna Phillips and Agnes Nixon, there are also explorations of how soaps handle race, sexual violence, and other strong topics.

    As the genre itself clings on through a few remaining titles, it’s also a good reminder of the depth and variety these shows have presented across radio and television. The series were and still are part of everyday life for people, and the book gives the genre a little of the respect it’s due.

    Television

    Television (usually old shows) are a consistent habit for me so going through everything would take far too long. Just a few titles to round us out.

    The Twilight Zone

    Title card for The Old Man in the Cave

    Up to season five of an epically slow run through of the series has brought me to The Old Man in the Cave and Uncle Simon. The first, an adaptation of a short story by Henry Slesar, brings Serling back to a recurring set of themes linked with nuclear war and our capacity for destroying ourselves. In it, an ‘old man’ in a cave keeps a small group of townspeople alive in the aftermath of nuclear bombs. Smartass, over-confident soldier James Coburn and his men show up and start to query just who this old man is and everything goes wrong. There’s something here about the safety of myths and not knowing the truth, and a great little show from Coburn as a real asshole.

    Cedric Hardwicke and Constance Ford in Uncle Simon

    Uncle Simon meanwhile finds Constance Ford’s miserable Barbara suffering the abuse of her misogynistic, arrogant, hateful, and importantly wealthy uncle. She has been doing so for years, in the withering hope that when he is finally dead, she will be able to live. The episode takes some agreeably strange twists and turns, but the things to come for are Serling’s fantastically bitter dialogue for two thoroughly embittered characters and an exploration of just how much misery someone can inflict and someone else can take. This misery has become the real companion to both Barbara and her uncle, and neither wants to let go.

    One Life to Live

    Judith Light as Karen Wolek in One Life to Live

    A particularly fine chapter from Sen in Love in the Afternoon, and Evening led me to seek out a somewhat notorious episode of One Life to Live from March 6th, 1979. In it, Karen Wolek (played by Judith Light) knew what she had to do to save her friend, Viki Lord. Viki was on trial for the murder of a pimp (well, actually one of Viki’s alternate personalities, Niki, was the presumed killer), and to exonerate her, Karen would have to get on the stand and tell the truth about herself. Karen would share her whereabouts on the day of the murder, with the prosecutor pushing her towards revealing everything. When she does, Karen tells a packed courtroom she has been working as a ‘common hooker’, torn between being compelled by her pimp, and enjoying the money and adventure her secret life provided.

    This episode made it onto a ‘100 Most Memorable Moments on Television’ list for TV Guide and it’s clear to see why. British audiences are likely to be more familiar with Light for her starring role in sitcom Who’s the Boss? or for Ugly Betty than One Life to Live. It comes as quite a shock then, that the final ten minutes of this episode contain one of the most incredible pieces of dramatic acting. Light is extraordinary on that stand, her defiant collapse haunting and moving. You might think you need to be a One Life to Live fan, or soap fan, or know what is happening in other plots to get this. You really don’t. The only thing required is watching an actor at the pinnacle of what can be done. A remarkable, beautiful performance that is some of the finest ten minutes out there.

    And that’s it. If you made it here, thanks for reading.

  • The Sixth Sense

    The horror show that dug its way out of the grave

    Gary Collins and Catherine Ferrar in a S1 promo photo

    The ignominious fate of The Sixth Sense (1972) television series – butchered, derided and ultimately forgotten – is undeserved. I’m going to spend some time exploring the show and what makes it a candidate for rediscovery and love for fans of paranormal and supernaturally-themed titles. The series has its basis in the 1971 made-for-TV movie Sweet, Sweet Rachel (dir. Sutton Roley). A number of other television films of the time, like The House That Wouldn’t Die (1970) and A Taste of Evil (1971) – both directed by John Llewellyn Moxey and Something Evil (1972, dir. Steven Spielberg) – had popularised themes of hauntings and psychological horror. 

    Roley’s film features Stephanie Powers as the titular Rachel, grieving for the husband who killed himself and worrying that her uncontrolled psychic abilities drove him to it. But she’s not the only one in the family with such ESP powers as Dr. Darrow (Alex Dreier) will find out in this psychic-murder-mystery. As he investigates what actually happened he must also use his own abilities to stay alive long enough to discover the truth. The film was written by Anthony Lawrence, a well-established writer who had previously worked on shows like Naked City (1959-1963), The Outer Limits (1963-1965), Medical Center (1969-1976) and many others. It’s weird and creepy and even amongst the films mentioned above, stands out as something special.

    Newspaper advert for Sweet, Sweet Rachel

    Lawrence would go on to use the central concept of a doctor of parapsychology investigating cases of apparent hauntings, psychic attacks and murder to create a weekly series. The main doctor for the show would be Dr. Michael Rhodes, played by Gary Collins, and Rhodes would similarly have his own ESP powers and frequently use this ability to solve the case. Collins was a well-established television actor who would go on to his greatest success as a talk-show host in the ‘80s, and it’s this unusual otherness he has (convincing as both) that brings Rhodes to life.

    The Sixth Sense also has its roots in a popular subset of paperbacks of the time, that of the women-in-paranormal-danger and house-of-evil kind. Only a year before, that great gothic-romance-horror-science fiction soap Dark Shadows (1966-1971) had finished its run (as well as producing two feature films).  Marilyn Ross (a pseudonym for author Dan Ross) had written a series of novels that separated from the show’s ongoing arcs, usually involving Barnabas and Quentin solving a supernatural mystery that frequently involved a damsel-in-distress.  

    Cover image for Victoria Winters by Marilyn Ross

    Many of the ‘women running from houses’ subgenre titles featured a woman arriving at a large house for some reason or other and finding love and supernatural danger within. Or it would feature a house with a dark and violent history and sinister intent for its new, often temporary inhabitants, as can be found in titles like Richard Matheson’s Hell House (1971). Around this time we also got novels like Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings (1973) which were, like Matheson’s tale, quickly adapted into films. It’s a trend that would continue on for some years, with authors like Bernard Taylor, Michael McDowell and V.C Andrews twisting these basics into ever more threatening directions in their novels, entwining sex and death and horror.

    (If you want to know more, there’s more on this era of writing in Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ‘70s and ‘80s Horror Fiction (2017, Quirk Books) by Grady Hendrix and Will Errickson).

    Example of a women-in-paranormal-danger novel cover

    So it’s easy to understand how The Sixth Sense could have been considered a dead cert for success.  Its core elements – paranormal mystery and women-in-danger – were those staples of many television movies and popular novels hitting big at the time. As much as the series was inarguably a paranormal show (with that element of the plots never being in question) it was also designed around the standard procedural template of many other hit shows. Imagine that Rhodes is essentially another uniquely brilliant television detective solving a crime and it’s not substantially different in format. 

    A few things made it stand out at the time, however. Firstly, although recent series Night Gallery (1970-1973) had found some moderate success with television horror, it was part of a number of anthology shows that had used the tools of the paranormal and horror for its stories, and was not a continuing series. Though it is strictly horror as compared to The Twilight Zone (1959-1964), Thriller (1960-1962), The Outer Limits et al which used the genre occasionally, Night Gallery was different for each week’s instalments. 

    The Sixth Sense’s closest anthology relative is one of the first that specialised in such themes, Alcoa Presents: One Step Beyond (1959-1961). The John Newland-hosted series told stories of possessions, hauntings and other such unlikely events and presented them to viewers as documents of truth about the unexplainable. Again, as an anthology every story was different and featured no reoccurring characters or situations. 

    Promo shot of Rhodes looking stylish and serious as fuck

    So in this respect, The Sixth Sense is one of the earliest paranormal-themed American series that featured the same characters involved in different plots each episode. The show also takes its premise completely seriously. There’s no late-60s style camp or arched eyebrow in delivery and unlike contemporary entertainment like the Carl Kolchak movies and the later Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974-1975) series it rarely uses humour to cut the tension. It is sincere, and expects its audience to completely buy in as well. There’s no cynicism involved and although the series regularly involves characters who refuse to believe or doubt Rhodes, they usually end up converted through the evidence of that week’s events they see with their own eyes. 

    The third element that separates out The Sixth Sense from simply being a procedural in different clothing is how the paranormal is presented. For an early 1970s show, it often goes out of its way with stylised jump-cutting, use of surprise, shadow, slow-motion and atmosphere-building to make the frequent paranormal events, deaths and attempted murders genuinely unsettling. And in this, the show does not make allowances for people – it’s actually out to unnerve. By today’s standards this is now tame of course, but the show was at the time using what often made one-off weekly movies scary for home audiences and attempting to utilise it on something that was also inviting you back each week for more.  

    Gary Collins as Rhodes in a promo shot

    There’s much to appreciate and enjoy in this show, especially if you’re a fan of the aforementioned anthologies and series or of subsequent shows like The X-Files (1993-2018) that deal in tales of the paranormal and the unexplainable. Not least in that The Sixth Sense had some outstanding episode titles: ‘I Do Not Belong to the Human World’, ‘Dear Joan, We Are Going to Scare You to Death’ and ‘I Did Not Mean to Slay Thee’ amongst many others through a 25-episode run. 

    As it’s a ‘70s series there is also a great list of guest stars who appeared in the run, including John Saxon, William Shatner, Joan Crawford (what an odd, format-twisting episode that one is), Henry Silva and many others. It took plots and inspirations from classic and contemporary films and novels and tried to do something at the time different with them. Though many of the plots are now familiar versions of common tropes from the paranormal the series was genuinely interesting in how it approached them. 

    Newspaper listing ad including Joan Crawford’s episode

    Sadly, the series is either not considered at all or remembered as part of the syndication butchery that affected Night Gallery. Both shows didn’t run for long enough for the syndication sweet spot (usually considered four full seasons or ideally a hundred or more episodes). The Sixth Sense had initially completed a short run of 13 episodes in the early part of 1972 and despite ratings that did not exactly scream hit it would come back for a final run of 12 more later in the year. 

    It didn’t fare well enough in the ratings against the likes of Mission: Impossible (1966-1973), itself nearing the end of its run and dipping in viewers, and so would not return for a third season. To make use of both Serling’s show and the total run of the Collins series, a thoroughly ridiculous idea was agreed: edit episodes of Night Gallery and The Sixth Sense together into half hour-long episodes and make Serling suffer shooting new introductions for the segments from a show he had nothing to do with. You could imagine that by cutting down two near-50 minute shows (at least in Gallery’s first two seasons) to 25 minutes and editing it into something totally unrelated it would cause problems, and so it did. Both the Night Gallery segments – often also edited down – and The Sixth Sense episodes became an unintelligible mess that benefited neither.  

    And this is how most people came to rememberThe Sixth Sense – a mess of a series that for decades after blighted Serling’s show. Its reputation became one of ruiner and failed in its own right and perhaps that is why the series has rarely been shown in its full form since the initial broadcast. That assessment of it, as a poor show that made worse a better show, is unfair. A French release in 2014 of the complete show on DVD, in its unedited and original sequence, was the first time that allowed us to rediscover a series that has much to offer (it had another DVD release in 2025 through Via Vision).

    It’s spooky, unsettling (those second season credits, damn), scary, often gripping and imaginative and absolutely entertaining fun. Seek it out, it is time very well spent.  I fucking love it.

  • A Wondrous Magic to Christmas

    Finding redemption with the festive spirit (and Rod Serling and Peter Cushing)

    ” The Night of the Meek” (The Twilight Zone Season 2, Episode 11)

    Henry Corwin in Santa costume, looking the worse for self-inflicted wear

    The Twilight Zone is inarguably one of television’s truly great series. For an anthology show it has a remarkable hit rate. Every such series had its duds but for this show, they are few and far between. Even the weakest episodes have something to them, a line of dialogue or a moment that sparkles. For this writer, Rod Serling is one of the most gifted writers the medium has ever had, and in addition to that was a compassionate person who used his work to connect audiences with their fellow humans, to illuminate the human condition, to encourage us to be better, to do better, to try again. The Twilight Zone often traded in stinging or stirring tales of fantasy, science fiction and sometimes horror. As with many shows, it also had its Christmas-themed episodes and it is one of them, “The Night of the Meek”, covered here.

    Title card for The Night of the Meek

    The macabre in Meek is people. The set up in the episode is following department store Santa and general sad sack Henry Corwin. Corwin doesn’t have much to look forward to other than his next drink. He lives in a ‘dirty rooming house’ and his world is one of hungry children and other ‘shabby’ people just like him. Corwin lives for his Santa routine but the shine has gone out of it.  His suit is old and worn and when he shows up too late and drunk with it for his gig, it’s over – he’s fired and ordered out of the store. Despite all of his woes, Corwin muses if he had one wish, it would be for the meek to actually see some rewards. When Corwin can’t even get back into the bar he frequents, he stumbles down an alleyway where the sound of sleigh bells are heard. 

    Corwin in his Santa costume in the department store, being berated by his boss

    In the alley, Corwin comes across a sack that he quickly discovers appears to have magical properties. It produces a seemingly never-ending stream of gifts. Whatever someone asks for, they get. His dream coming true, Corwin starts handing out gifts to the poor kids and down and out men nearby. The episode continues with this mix of melancholic reality and fantastical whimsy towards its hopeful conclusion.

    Corwin discovering a sack full of presents in a snowy alley

    In the episode, people are the worst. Everyone expects and looks for the worst in Corwin because that’s the type of guy they think he is. It’s the type of guy Corwin has come to think he is too, and it’s pretty obvious his idealism and hope is frayed and being drowned in a puddle of cheap booze.  Corwin is us – we want to believe in the best of people, but people make it pretty damn hard. Now, Serling had around 25 minutes an episode to do set-up, delivery and conclusion of his stories and so subtlety was not always the prime concern. The characters, Corwin included, are mostly broad sketches, with people like the shop manager Dundee being not much more than functional cliché. They’re ciphers for the point Serling is making about what Christmas can represent. 

    Corwin watching a young child enjoying a train track set up

    It can, if we let it, represent good will to each other, hope for the future and the unity such celebrations can bring.  If we let go of the hardened cynicism and the weariness, if we let such notions in, even if it’s only for one night we can believe that we’re more good than bad, that’s there something worth saving in us, that we can believe in magic. For many, that’s a hard thing to do in a world, in a world that tells us there’s no magic left, only bleakness and decline. In the time The Twilight Zone was first airing it was only 15 years or so since the end of WW2. It was before Vietnam, race riots, Watergate and innumerable other events conspired to convince even the most indefatigable optimist that we’re on a downward spiral as a species. 

    That’s not to say things were better then as many things were emphatically not. But it’s for this reason that we should arguably let a little magic into our lives. Believing in Santa Claus might have ended a long time ago for most of us but believing in each other, or that there is some goodness out there, is something we all need these days. And if anyone can convince you to believe in your bones that humans are redeemable, it would be Serling.

    Rod Serling in coat covered in totally real snow, speaking to camera

    As Rod himself puts it in the closing narration “There’s a wondrous magic to Christmas”, so here’s to Henry Corwin and here’s to The Twilight Zone and a momentary respite, a sliver of the brightest light in the darkness of winter.

    Cash on Demand

    Cash on Demand title card

    How does Cash on Demand (1961, dir. Quentin Lawrence) evoke a similar joy? Well, it’s not just the ideal Christmas movie but a reminder that, for those of us who might despair at humanity’s worst instincts more days than not, change is possible. Based on the play, it’s the tale of bank manager Harry Fordyce (Peter Cushing), a fussily fastidious man who rules over his branch not so much with a clenched fist but a puckered sphincter. The opening scenes set up the tight-knit team of staff in the bank as they await Fordyce’s arrival. When he does appear their anxious joviality is curtailed and it’s down to the business of money.

    Fordyce looking for flaws in the polished plaque outside the bank

    Not long after this, André Morell pulls up at the bank, his character Colonel Gore-Hepburn supposedly an insurance inspector but in fact a bank robber. Using threats and coercion, Gore-Hepburn forces the unravelling Fordyce to partake in robbing his own bank. Without giving anything away, the plot twists, new wrinkles are added and tension is ratcheted up. Throughout all this Cushing is wonderfully good, ensuring Fordyce is no cliche and imbuing him with humanity throughout. Morell matches him throughout as the smooth, assured, and ruthless bank robber. 

    Fordyce on the phone in his office as Gore-Hepburn looks on, his plan coming together

    Cash on Demand is a twist on A Christmas Carol. Fordyce might not be the wicked man Scrooge was, but he has forgotten what makes a person. He’s not mean to his staff so much as dismissive of their personhood and feelings, only focussing on the bank and profit. We know early on he has a child and wife he feels affection for, but that’s as far as human warmth goes for him. As Gore-Hepburn’s scheme to steal thousands of pounds unwinds, and Fordyce is forced to become part of the heist, he must confront what he has become, what is really important to him, and reconnect with the world he lives in. It’s an uplifting, very human film about hope and change and our ability for both that is just as needed in these modern times.

    Fordyce looking directly to camera, a concerned and unsettled look on his face

    The Christmas trappings aren’t window dressing either. The time of year the story is set is intrinsic to the mood and atmosphere of the piece and to Fordyce’s journey. Of course, it’s a fine film that could be shown at any time of year. But what it says about us as people is a classic Christmas message. If you want a beautifully judged thriller, full of quotable dialogue, with one great scene after another, excellent performances, and something to say about what it means to be alive, this is it.

  • Whitechapel: A bloody good time

    A Great British horror television series remembered

    Phil Davis, Steve Pemberton and Rupert Penry-Jones as the central trio of Whitechapel

    When we talk about the best British horror television, it seems there is rarely a mention of Whitechapel, which ran on ITV for four series between 2009 and 2013. Perhaps that is because Whitechapel was presented at first glance as An Other cop show, if ever so slightly more acquainted with the grimmer side of that genre. It was so much more than that in its finished form. And so, dear reader, it’s time to set things right and celebrate this glorious, pulpy, luridly compelling and emotionally involving show. Be warned, said celebration is slightly spoilery. 

    Created and almost exclusively written by the couple Ben Court and Caroline Ip, Whitechapel starts by taking us into the heart of darkness that is a copycat killer seeking to reenact the murders of Jack the Ripper, bringing a new reign of terror to the capital. Subsequent series explore the secret sons of the Kray twins following their fathers’ worst examples, and tales inspired by H.H. Holmes, the Marquis de Sade, London After Midnight, witch hunts, a killer who flays the faces from their victims and a deranged cult seeking to bring about the apocalypse. Then there’s the ongoing arc that bubbles away in the background about Whitechapel very possibly being a gate to hell. Add to that the mysterious Louise Iver, played to perfection by Angela Pleasence. Iver may be a sweet if somewhat rude old lady, but she also may be something even older and significantly more evil and dangerous. The clue might be in the name.

    One of the things that makes Whitechapel so enjoyable is the cast and characters. As the first series begins, Rupert Penry-Jones plays DI Joseph Chandler. Joseph is the son of a well-respected and long-dead police officer. The largely untested Chandler has been put on the fast track to promotion by his father’s friend Commander Anderson and is given his first big assignment when a woman is found murdered in Whitechapel. He arrives to lead the team charged with investigating it, a team in practice being lead by the old school copper DS Ray Miles, played by Phil Davis. Soon, and much to Miles’ displeasure, Chandler has enlisted the involvement of noted Ripperologist Edward Buchan, played by Steve Pemberton. Buchan suggests to Chandler that the murders that are afflicting Whitechapel are the work of someone trying to recreate Jack’s crimes in precise detail. So begins this unlikely and at times often uncomfortable trio’s journey into a hidden and deadly part of London.

    Joseph Chander in front of a crime board

    Whitechapel is a darkly violent series and doesn’t shy away from presenting the killings and the impact they have on those investigating and the community itself. So far, so lurid. And yet, through its minor characters and particularly Buchan’s character arc it balances this out by paying attention to the victims. From a writing perspective, Court and Ip are skilled at including the briefest of character moments that allow peeks into their lives beyond what is presented onscreen. Whitechapel takes place in a version of London that has violence seeping through its cracks at every turn, in later episodes almost apocalyptically so. The characters provide a counterbalance to this that allows the show to walk a tightrope between pulp, horror-soaked crime and retaining its humanity.

    Chandler ready to box, Miles ready to soak up the blood

    Our three nominal leads do some of their best work in this series. Penry-Jones’ Chandler at first threatens to be the cliched ‘untested’ but arrogant cop-in-charge but Court and Ip subtly subvert that early on and expand on it throughout. Chandler is the very image of well-presented modern policing: meticulous, smart and indefatigably moral. But he’s also riven by self-doubt and neurosis. There’s some short hand here in the way that is done, particularly with Chandler’s fixation on physical order, but it is thought out, sympathetic and never played for cheap laughs or at the expense of actual depth. Penry-Jones is excellent throughout, ensuring Joseph is a fully rounded character. Davis matches him as Miles, and although the two must initially play out the combative new vs old school methodology cliche, again Court and Ip subvert this. The relationship that develops between Chandler and Miles is the core of the series but it is never allowed to get stale or comfortable. These two men find something in each other, but it’s not as brothers or a father/son surrogate but instead something deeper and more satisfying.

    Buchan and Miles in a shadow filled room

    Pemberton has the flashier role, as the show begins. Buchan is a Ripperologist who runs walking tours of the area where Jack did his ‘work’. He has a deep knowledge of the criminal history of Whitechapel and considers himself an investigator. But Buchan is out of his depth and as the first series progresses is forced to confront his own relationship with the crimes and how exploitation and the distance of time has allowed him to disconnect from the real-life weight of grief. His desire to be clever and invaluable to the investigation has personal consequences that follow him for the rest of the series. Pemberton does some excellent work exploring Buchan’s moral and professional collapse and subsequent rebuilding.

    The rest of the cast, which shifts slightly before settling into a unit for the final two series, provide Chandler, Miles and Buchan with a solid, likeable team. Another admirable aspect of Whitechapel is Court and Ip avoiding the modern malaise of the workplace ‘family’, that cliche ignoring as it often does that families bicker, sometimes viscously so, and that peace is sometimes uneasy, just as it is here. It’s a mark of a good cast that every time a regular appears (like Claire Rushbrook’s Dr. Llewellyn) it’s not just to further the plot, we also want to learn a little bit more about their characters. The various guest performers that fill the series are excellent too, from Craig Parkinson’s Kray twins via Peter Serafinowicz’s unnervingly bad apple cop to Lydia Leonard’s doomed Morgan Lamb.

    Miles and Chandler in – surprise, surprise – a shadow filled room

    There are other crime dramas that have an affection for horror and pulp influences that are clear in their approach, notably Luther. But although such shows and films with flirt with these influences they are first and foremost thrillers. Whitechapel is a procedural, there’s no doubt of that. But it is equally pure horror and once it reaches the third series, goes full tilt into first slasher influences and then a run of witches, urban legend (killer pigs in the sewers anyone) and apocalyptic terror. The series loves its milieu and there’s a lot to enjoy in picking out these influences and the tributes and homages that fill the episodes and load it with atmosphere. There are some bravura, tension-packed set pieces throughout and the show is agreeably unafraid of the absurd and the overblown when it is needed, delighting in red herrings and left-turn plot twists.

    Amidst all of this, Whitechapel never forgets its characters or its humanity. It is a series that sets out to thrill, disturb, entertain and deliver heart too, something it succeeds in . Take this as full-blooded recommendation thatWhitechapel is one of British television’s finest, most enjoyable horror series, ripe for (re)discovery. 

  • A Peculiar and Beguiling Bleakness

    Casting the Runes (1979) and updating M.R. James for the Scarred for Life generation (this article previously published on the now-defunct Horrified website)

    Title card of the episode shows Casting the Runes written in red against a shot of fields and trees covered in snow, the sun’s rays raising from behind a hill

    The 1970s was a time of wild contrast in Britain. Wealth inequality was at its lowest but the country was beset by industrial action. Music, film and television had entered a period of creative fecundity that would continue Britain’s position as an innovator and leader in culture. Alongside this, the country was afflicted by power cuts, inflation, the rise of the far-right and the beginning of the slow death of that one-generation-only dream of the middle class. Parallels can be drawn with our most recent decade or so, one where it has seemed the good times are over and terminal decline is inevitable. 

    It is perhaps then not surprising that the horror produced throughout the decade had a peculiar and beguiling bleakness. Stories across books, film and television took us to dark places and often left us there at their conclusion, no happy endings or release. One of the towering achievements of these years was the annual BBC A Ghost Story for Christmas, a mix of filmed adaptations of M.R. James, Dickens and original screenplays (one of which, Stigma, was contributed by the writer of this version of Casting the Runes, Clive Exton). These haunting tales of a genuinely disturbing and dangerous ‘other’ lurking just out of sight are rightly hailed as classics of the genre. 

    A man and a dog crouch on snowy ground, looking around them, the man appearing to be concerned – behind him, on the hill, a stone figure of a demon can be seen

    All but one of these were directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, a talented director with an unerring ability to present creeping dread onscreen. After he had finished with the BBC sequence, Clark wasn’t done with the supernatural. For the ITV Playhouse strand he took on the challenge of providing an updated version of M.R. James’ ‘Casting the Runes’. The story had been adapted some two decades before for the classic Night of the Demon (1957, dir. Jacques Tourneur), one of the great British horror films. A decade later it was adapted again for the anthology series Mystery and Imagination, an episode that is sadly lost to us.

    As with Jacques Tourneur’s film, Casting the Runes updates the story to contemporary times. It gives us a female Dunning (played here by Jan Francis) and an American Karswell (Iain Cuthbertson) and adheres loosely to the main beats of James’ chilling short story. It’s a version that isn’t particularly well remembered these days, or seemingly thought of highly, in comparison with its more elegantly mounted BBC relatives, or the 1957 film. We have a tendency to compare needlessly, and a low-budget 50 minute television adaptation shot on a mix of film and video has little chance of equalling the impact of a crisply produced black and white big screen version directed by one of Hollywood’s most skilled psychological horror craftsmen.

    Dunning and Derek Gayton in a room, looking a small slip of paper with runes on them

    And yet, there is much to enjoy in this production, starting with a glorious opening sequence which took full advantage of the blizzard conditions it was shot in. There’s a clear folk horror influence to this beginning, evoking memories of films like The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971, dir. Piers Haggard), finding as it does the menace inherent in indifferent nature. As we start, a man we later learn is called John Harrington is out walking his dog in the snowy countryside until the animal becomes unnerved by the presence of something out there with them, something that is slowly, inevitably hunting John. It benefits hugely from the snowy landscape and, in its un-retouched presentation on DVD, a scratchy film print as well as a menacing score. 

    In this iteration, Karswell is a cult figure, the self-styled Abbot of Lufford, and he has made somewhat of a name for himself as writer of a book called ‘A History of Witchcraft’ and as proponent of a philosophy that would have ‘Vice as the only true virtue, lust as the only true modesty, indecency the only true decorum and evil the only true good’. When Karswell is mocked by a television exposé on ‘mumbo jumbo’ produced by Dunning, he determines to take his revenge on her next. Our introduction to Karswell is the converted rectory where he lives, surrounded by grand gold ornaments. Karswell enacts his curse, manufacturing a meeting with Dunning. When Dunning is attacked in her bed by a creature created from Karswell’s magic, and she learns Harrington had written a scathing report of Karswell’s book and paid for his life with it, Dunning begins to understand her scepticism will not keep her safe.

    Karswell, a smugly mean expression on his face, holds a small figure with red clothes and dark hair

    The remainder of the play, whilst not overtly frightening or aiming to be, is equal parts unnerving and melancholy. Exton and Clark work together to create a world where the characters live in a definably real world that is being intruded by something ancient and unrelenting. There are some great performances, with Francis an anchor to everything as the unravelling Dunning. Cuthbertson has a grand time as the wicked Karswell, here a genuinely malevolent presence, a character who seems to revel in the power he wields. Being a production made in the 1970s and filtering through a decade of that beguiling, bleak approach the play also has a suitably harsh conclusion as it fades out, the wreckage caused by Karswell extending far beyond the final shot of a devastated Dunning.

    A man in a long coat and hat at the crest of a footbridge covered in snow

    Though not part of the BBC ghost stories, this adaptation of ‘Casting the Runes’ shows Clark learned well what worked for them and has much to recommend for those who appreciate the uniquely chilly, uncompromising horror the 1970s produced and acts as an effective chaser to much of what proceeded it. 

    (The version referenced throughout is from a now out-of-print Network DVD release, though the episode can be found in other places online)

  • Carl Kolchak: An Appreciation

    Darren McGavin as Carl Kolchak

    It’s my esteemed and correct opinion that Carl Kolchak is one of popular culture’s greatest characters. As brought to life by Darren McGavin in a shabby seersucker suit and straw hat, he’s a lovably shambolic, rough-edged crusader for the truth. The reporter started out life as the main focus of Jeff Rice’s novel The Kolchak Papers. It tells of a foul-mouthed drunk who had a remarkable story to tell about a vampire loose in Las Vegas, who used Rice to get his story out. As he was working unsuccessfully to get the book published Rice was also inking deals with those who could put his story on the screen. This was the early 70s and television movies were a huge deal, bringing in massive audiences. So when ABC optioned the book you can imagine Rice’s excitement at the prospect of bringing Kolchak to homes all across America. Ultimately it would be the hugely talented Richard Matheson who would write the script, slightly softening Carl’s gruff edges but keeping the humour and commentary that pops off the pages of Rice’s book (I don’t think Stephen King was a fan, however).

    Dan Curtis was onboard as producer and it might be hard to get just how big now, but Curtis’ previous project Dark Shadows which had finished in 1971 was huge. It turned the reluctant Jonathan Frid into an unlikely middle-aged sex symbol and had a generation of monsters kids running home from school to follow plots of vampires, werewolves and all sorts of supernatural chicanery taking place.

    Title card for The Night Stalker (1972)

    John Llewellyn Moxey was brought in to direct and in early January 1972 Carl made his screen debut. It was a smash hit and brought in the biggest ever audience for a TV movie at the time.  There’s a reason it was a hit: it’s near perfect, a mix of serious scares and humour centred around McGavin’s effortlessly charming performance, ably supported by Simon Oakland as his suffering editor Tony Vincenzo. At first here Kolchak is a beat reporter, using his police scanner to show up as quickly as possible at crime scenes and generally making himself a nuisance to the powers that be.

    When young women start turning up murdered, Kolchak thinks he’s got a killer on the rampage, but soon he finds out this killer might not even be human. Carl’s the type of guy who goes where the leads take him and so when the pieces start to fit that it’s a vampire that is killing these women, Carl thinks something must be done. Those powers that be aren’t buying it and they set about making Kolchak’s life even harder work. But that’s not going to stop him getting to the truth and doing what it takes to stop the bloodsucker from getting away with it. The thing about Carl is that he believes the people have a right to know and he’ll protect that right no matter the cost to himself. It’s not that he’s particularly noble, it’s more a compulsion that truths hidden should be revealed. If you haven’t ever enjoyed this classic go and find it now.

    Carl holding a cross up to repel something nasty

    When The Night Stalker was a huge hit, inevitably talk of a sequel followed. That talk turned to action in double time and in 1973 The Night Strangler followed this time directed by Curtis. In this one Kolchak has relocated (not through choice) to Seattle and comes into contact once again with a despondent Vincenzo. At the same time another killer is murdering people by strangling them (but of course) and using their blood to stay alive, something they have been doing for over a 100 years. Kolchak discovers the truth but again narrowly avoids getting killed for his troubles and is railroaded out of town for good.

    The same year Rice finally got his novel published as a tie-in to the first film. A reverse of the first film’s process next year found Rice adapting Matheson’s Strangler script for a tie-in book that would be published in 1974, the same year the series started. Before that Kolchak had nearly made it into a third film, in a script by Matheson and William F. Nolan called The Night Killers which would have had Carl in conflict with android replicas. McGavin was tiring of the formula and didn’t want to do it. Curtis wasn’t apparently impressed either and things cooled for a while, during which Curtis and Nolan went off to do spooky TV movie The Norliss Tapes, which could easily have been a Kolchak case. 

    A police sketch of the undead killer in The Night Strangler (1973)

    Eventually after negotiation, McGavin was tempted back for a weekly series which he could produce, although Curtis was finished with it and opted out. In September 1974, after multiple protracted negotiations and fallouts, and in a season ABC desperately needed success in, Kolchak: The Night Stalker hit small screens as a weekly show. The first episode was ‘The Ripper’, and it finds Carl now set up in Chicago, still working for Vincenzo. It’s almost a remake of sorts of the two films with its story of a madman killing people off who turns out to be THE Ripper, a maniac of unusual longevity.

    Like many an episode of Kolchak it has its good and bad elements. Plotting in the episodes is frequently perfunctory, low budget monster-of-the-week stuff that holds few surprises. But the series still had it’s star in McGavin and he’s reliably excellent no matter if he’s being chased around a cruise ship by a ‘werewolf’ who resembles more a guy who fell face first into some hair-restorer as opposed to a beastly lycanthrope, or sowing a zombie’s mouth shut and hoping it’s not going to wake up while he’s doing it. There’s many reasons to love McGavin but there’s a great little moment in ‘The Ripper’ where you just know he’s doing it the way you would too. Trapped in the Ripper’s room all Kolchak has to do is stay quiet and he’ll make it out unseen. But when the Ripper gets too close Kolchak lets out a yelp and makes a run for it, blowing his cover. By grounding Carl in recognisable flaws and humour, he became more real to us. Not an impervious hero but instead a dude who’s scared shitless but can’t turn away from the truth or doing what needs to be done.  

    Carl with microphone and puzzled expression

    When you go back to the series now one of its strengths is just how infrequently it chose to stick with the usual screen horror villains. Sure, there’s the Ripper and a werewolf and another zombie. There’s even another vampire but it links in with The Night Stalker in an interesting way and is one of the best episodes. But others included witches, prehistoric monsters, a haunted knight’s armour, robots, aliens and demonic spirits. This level of creativity always fought against the network drive to make every week’s entertainment broadly the same as the week before and is representative of what eventually brought the series down before it’s first season had finished, with a few scripts un-produced. Ratings were never massive and as the series went on McGavin got restless and the network could see it was not the hit they hoped for, with the various attempts at meddling causing friction between star and studio. In 1975 the episode order was cut by two and Kolchak limped to a sad end. But it was not the end really.  

    Reruns of the series would find more receptive viewers in the late 70s and this would continue through the 1980s until the series found a new home on the cable Sci-Fi Channel at roughly the same time a new series called The X-Files on Fox was moving from cult hit to mainstream sensation. Chris Carter has spoken before of his memories of Kolchak in part inspiring Fox Mulder and Dana Scully’s adventures and this helped continue to build an interest for newer viewers as to who this Carl Kolchak was. Home video releases of the first film and series started to surface too, along with the reruns allowing people to get to know McGavin’s intrepid reporter again. Mark Dawidziak, a critic for an American newspaper, wrote a guide book on Kolchak that arrived in 1991 called Night Stalking: A 20th Anniversary Kolchak Companion. This led in turn to a new deal between Rice and the same book’s publisher for new Kolchak novels. To kick it off Dawidziak was tasked with writing the third book (to follow on from the films and series) and Grave Secrets duly arrived in 1994. The deal for more faltered when the publisher was unable to actually get anything else in print and nothing more would arrive for some years. But thanks to Dark Shadows actor Kathryn Leigh-Scott’s publishing company Pomegranate Press an updated and now illustrated 25th anniversary edition of Dawidziak’s definitive book would arrive in 1997. (Updated: It has recently been republished and greatly expanded for a new 2026 release through Commonwealth Book Company)

    Cover for Jeff Rice’s The Night Stalker novel

    After this, the new century found Carl in surprisingly good health. Universal released a (sadly totally extras-free) box set of the entire series. The two TV movies came out on a dual film release.  A book with Matheson’s three scripts (including The Night Killers) was released with introductions by Dawidziak. Moonstone Books began publishing comics based on the character in 2003 and these became almost an industry in their own right, covering Kolchak through comics (with adaptations of the first film and unfilled scripts), novels and short story compilations. More comic adventures have followed.

    In 2005, a short-lived revival series aired starring Stuart Townsend as Carl in an updated version taking in modern TV’s story-arc concerns. Low ratings and inevitable but unfair comparisons to The X-Files did for Night Stalker after only 6 episodes were aired, but it’s a remarkably good and interesting series in its own right. Frank Spotnitz was show runner and took influences from the original but filtered it through a style more influenced by Michael Mann that left us with an unfinished show that is significantly more interesting than its reputation suggests. It’s not all been good news. Back in 2012 Disney announced a film adaptation was in the early stages with Johnny Depp as Kolchak and Edgar Wright directing.  This (with or without Depp and Wright) turned out to be just an idea and so far Kolchak has yet to return to the screen. Perhaps this is for the best, given the debacle of Depp’s Dark Shadows film and…you know…everything else.

    Carl with a makeshift cross and an angry looking vampire

    But if his history has taught us anything it’s that Carl is a tenacious sonofabitch and it’s likely we’ll have him back on the screen someway, somehow. For now though, if you haven’t yet had the pleasure, go find The Night Stalker and get introduced.

    (Recent years also found the original films and series getting American Blu-ray releases, another resurrection for Carl)

    Further suggested reading:

    The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler by Jeff Rice (published variously as separate books and a one-volume compilation)

    The Kolchak Companion: 50 Years of Night Stalking by Mark Dawidziak (Commonwealth Book Company, Inc., 2026)

    The Kolchak Papers: Grave Secrets by Mark Dawidziak (Cinemaker Press, 1994)

    The Moonstone Books various comics, graphic novels, short story compilations and full-length novels.  

    Progeny of the Adder by Les Whitten (Doubleday, 1965).  This is a book at some points rumoured to have ‘inspired’ Rice as it tells the story of a modern vampire terrorising a city (in this case Washington DC) and the desperate attempts to stop the killings. Similarities are superficial at most, but still, a good book is a good book, so read it anyway.

  • How did horror dig its claws into you?

    Photographs of dead people, oh my.

    The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall caught on film. Maybe.

    (This is an update of an old piece written for the now-deceased site Horrified, which opened a column for contributors to share the moments that meant the most to them, the flesh and blood of their horror experience. What chilled blood and warmed hearts. A jolt of electricity or two and, like a shambling patchwork corpse, it’s resurrected for this blog.)

    Horror. It bewitches us, fires our imagination, burns itself into our being. There’s a lot to the genre we love and what connects us with it the most. It’s in the stories, the emotions, the atmosphere, the aesthetics. And it’s in the moments we find and the impact they have, from jarring scare to creeping, lingering dread. Most often it is these moments that stay with us and inform how we feel about a film, or television show or book.

    It’s in that zoom to Christopher Lee’s pitiful creature unravelling its bandages and moving from confusion to murderous rage in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957, dir. Terence Fisher). Or in Peter Vaughan’s desperate and doomed attempt to escape the the curse he has brought on himself in A Warning to the Curious (1972, dir. Lawrence Gordon Clark). Or those final, chilling moments of Ghostwatch (1992, dir. Lesley Manning) when we realise there will be no happy ending. It is moments like these that resonate with us and evoke the most visceral responses.

    My experience will be familiar to anyone who grew up in the seventies, eighties and into the nineties. Back in these pre-internet days, a burgeoning horror fan still had much to choose from. From television showings of classic films in the wee hours to horror running through Baker-era Doctor Who’s DNA to huge hits like The X-Files, and a multitude of books, magazines and comics, these decades were awash with plenty to thrill the spookily-inclined. It was the halcyon days of monster magazines, fanzines, and short-lived but still fondly remembered comic titles like Scream! (1984). As the Scarred for Life team have demonstrated in their multi-volume hymn to what terrified people in the seventies and eighties, horror rippled through these years and continued to captivate more converts as the new millennium approached.

    Despite this, back in those days, we could not look up the history of a film or series or book with a few clicks or taps of a screen. It was the days of mail order, local discovery in your comic shop or newsagent of choice, or shared between friends like niche contraband. And it was not cosy or kind. It was gory film images in copies of Fangoria or latterly The Dark Side. It was sleepy, half-glimpsed nightmares in late night showings. On occasion, these images, these photographs were of something real, too. Magazines would do stories on ghosts ‘caught on film’. Issues of The Unexplained: Mysteries of Mind, Space and Time (Orbis Publishing, 1980-1983) were filled with mind-altering, frequently terrifying stories which were so wild they could only be true. And, in one of his television series devoted to exploring phenomena, Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers (Yorkshire Television, 1985), the author focussed on ‘Fairies, Phantoms and Fantastic Photographs’ (Ep 7, 22 May 1985).

    The Reverend K. F. Lord’s photograph of the Spectre of Newby Church. Maybe.

    There is one photo discovery from this era that lingers with me the most. The Spectre of Newby Church was bad enough, but the picture taken of Mrs Ellen Hammell by her daughter was the stuff of beguiling nightmare. In 1959, Mabel Chinnery had taken a photo of her husband sat in their car, but when developed there was a passenger of sorts. Behind her husband sat Ellen, Mabel’s recently departed mother. She had been dead a week. It’s grainy and Mrs Hammell’s straight posture is unnerving enough. But where the eyes should be is only white, like some sort of terrifying gateway into the beyond. When you are young, you don’t know anything about double exposures, trick photography or anything else that would explain it away. And this isn’t a film or show, it’s real. On film. Right there; a ghost. As an adult my rational mind knows there is an explanation for it, that there is (on the balance of available evidence) no ghost ever caught on film. And yet…

    The recently deceased Ellen Hammell catching a lift with her son-in-law. Maybe.

    It would probably be remarkable for Mabel Chinnery to learn that, for me and for others, this image and ones like it opened a door onto other worlds and possibilities in a way films, television and books could not. It frightened me to my very core, and yet I could not look away, because of the possibility of something horrific being actually tangible. Perhaps inescapable. Just like a love of horror. 

  • March Cultural Highlights

    A brief journey through what has been distracting me this month

    Book highlights this month

    Cover image of Born to Lose: Tales of Gigi by Marek Z. Turner

    Marek Z. Turner had the inspired idea to take a minor character from a Dario Argento film, Cat O’ Nine Tails, and make him the central focus of a book detailing some of his career as a burglar and minor-league criminal in Turin during the 1970s. Born to Lose: Tales of Gigi is a look into the world of Gianluigi ‘Gigi’ Moretti, a not-untalented burglar frequently derailed by alcohol, and equal parts poor luck and bad judgement.

    Turner finds comedic gold along with pathos as Gigi encounters everything from explosively broken toilets to double crosses and, in the book’s set piece story, a desperate attempt to outwit a deadly assassin. He has done his research and submerged himself in the culture of that decade in Italy, but also layers the stories with details of Turin and the realities of being a petty criminal nobody that add to a feeling of authenticity. The tone weaves with skill between being genuinely amusing, bittersweet with melancholy and escalating in tension, sometimes within the same story. I really enjoyed Born to Lose, and recommend not just it but Marek’s previous two books: another crime story (the brutal thriller The Eighth Hill) and a gory creature-feature horror (Killerpede) that opens with a bravura, grotesque death sequence that enjoyably sets the tone.

    Television highlights this month

    Close up from Public Affairs – DR-07, of a hand holding a badge that says ‘Make Love Not War’ on it

    Dragnet 1969: After writing about Jack Webb earlier this month it sent me back to what is probably still the defining achievement of his career, the resurrection of Dragnet in the 1960s for television.

    Launched in 1967, each of the four seasons are defined by the year they were broadcast. Dragnet 1969 is the show’s third season and the one where Webb detaches more significantly than in previous years from the template his original series (from the 1950s) had established. There’s only occasional room for the crime-of-the-week format from now on as Webb instead focuses on various functions of the police officer’s role in Los Angeles. I’ve not long reached a mid-season episode where Friday and Gannon are pulling duty at the Business Office (essentially the front desk) and it’s glorious.

    Webb sets out his stall from episode one this season, ‘Public Affairs – DR-07’, in which Friday and Gannon are sent as LAPD representatives to sit on a panel for the show Speak Your Mind. They are up against ‘historian, social critic, and political activist’ Professor Tom Higgins and Jesse Chaplin, ‘editor-publisher of L.A.’s favorite underground newspaper’. Neither are fans of the police. Nor is anyone in the crowd. What follows is 25-ish minutes of fantastic television, as Friday and Gannon respond to charges the police are a state goon squad solely there to protect property, to oppress Black people, and that a “man of conscience (has) the obligation do disobey outmoded laws“, including the police.

    Dragnet 1969 (and its other seasons) is a fascinating record of television and society changing to reflect the momentous events of the decade. It’s also simply very entertaining, directed in Webb’s clipped, easily parodied style, and as individual a series as you’re likely to find. Revisiting Dragnet 1969 also led me back to Suzy Dragnet’s wonderful blog ‘Everyone Nods: The Dragnet Style Files, a work of art in and of itself.

    Poster image for The Remarkable 20th Century

    The Remarkable 20th Century: I’ve also been taking a slow meander through a documentary series from 2000, The Remarkable 20th Century, presented by Howard K. Smith, one of the Murrow Boys and well positioned to host as someone who spent six decades of his life reporting on the events of the day. It’s a mix of talking heads and substantial footage from news reels and programmes, some of it potently shocking in its intensity. Each episode romps at speed through a decade and as such, it touches on events before moving on to the next big thing, but the fascination of what is unfolding prompts you to explore more after. Given the state of the world today – and its leaders – it’s clear we have learned little from history. Those leaders could certainly do with even this swift gallop through the best and the worst of last century.

    Warren Oates with GIANT EYES in The Mutant, episode 25 of The Outer Limits’ first season

    The Outer Limits: I am currently back to a run through The Outer Limits and up to ‘The Mutant’, the 25th episode of the first season. This has one of the most iconic ‘bears’* of the series, Warren Oates’ bug-eyed telepathic mutant Reese. It benefits immensely from Oates’ off-kilter rhythms and strange charm as he makes Reese feel genuinely ‘other’. Reese would likely be strange even if he didn’t have giant eyes and the ability to think people out of existence. It’s a good episode of a great show that twisted noir and fantasy, science fiction and horror into something uniquely queasy.

    *’Bear’ was the name given to the monster of the week, displayed prominently and quickly (usually in a pre-credits tease)

    Lola Albright and Craig Stevens in Peter Gunn

    Peter Gunn: I’m also back to Peter Gunn, a private investigator series created by Blake Edwards in the late 1950s. It has a jazzy score and instantly recognisable theme by Henry Mancini, and each week finds Gunn taking on a case that frequently gets him beaten up and/or nearly killed. Gunn is a good guy and that gets him into trouble as he comes up against gangsters, duplicitous dames and other unsavoury types. It’s a little slice of noir each episode, gorgeously shot and usually dependably entertaining. A lot of fun, and very much recommended.

    Music highlights this month

    Cover of Lonely People with Power by Deafheaven

    I quite like a lot of music, but it’s rare there will be a music highlight, given I only love two bands, listen to one band more than anyone else by far, and am generally otherwise indifferent to a lot of what gets released.

    But… this month, that one band I listen to the most by far released their first album in nearly four years, and it’s a beautiful record that distills everything that makes them special. Lonely People with Power by Deafheaven is a joyous listen from beginning to end. That might sound unlikely for a band that have mostly returned to their dense, overwhelming signature sound after a segue into lighter territory. It might also seem unlikely for a record that runs to just over an hour and keeps up a sustained mood of furious apocalyptic melancholy. But, we are where we are.

    Unlike lots of heavy music that trades in tedious machismo or bludgeoning anger, Deafheaven, and Lonely People with Power, takes darker emotions and fashions them into something else entirely. Blastbeats and giant riffs mix in with influences that vary from nineties British rock to ambient soundtracks. It’s the soundtrack to the end of the world, sure, but it’s a beautiful end. This might be their best apocalypse yet.

  • Rod Serling doesn’t want you to be a piece of shit, and neither do I

    Contemplating the panic of the inevitable in ‘The Cemetery’ and the choices we make

    Rod Serling posing in a graveyard setting for a promotional photo

    For several reasons, I’ve been thinking more in recent years about who I understand myself to be and what legacy I want to leave in my wake. Legacy might sound overly grand, but that’s really what it is to be thought of and remembered and talked about, whether it’s by millions or by whatever nucleus of immediate people you hold to be family. A worldwide pandemic will get you to thinking about the impact we all leave on each other, and that’s not even the sum total of an at times challenging, rewarding and enlightening few years that have followed to process. Largely for me it’s about the impact of leaving the people and places you find along the way better than you found them, or at least not worse for your presence. But life makes that hard. Communicating with each other with kindness and empathy and consistency is a journey that doesn’t end. Trying to be good to the planet that hosts us while just a handful of companies continue to be the biggest polluters in the world provokes wild cognitive dissonance. Capitalism swirling the drain and dragging us with it, bloody-knuckled and exhausted, into the slop. Social media a distracting feedback loop where we play out status games and performative emoting while the literal and figurative world around us burns. The worst people clinging ruthlessly to positions of power and scapegoating the most vulnerable as cause of the world’s ills. It is easy to lose focus. 

    What has this got to do with Roddy McDowall and the Night Gallery pilot film (NBC, 1969) you may ask? Well, firstly Rod Serling and his writing has been one of the primary influences in my life on my own personal philosophy about how I treat people and how my own personal code developed, and I come back to his work regularly for course correction as much as entertainment. And in ‘The Cemetery’ and McDowall’s phenomenal performance we have humanity in crisis in microcosm, in all its sadness and rage and selfishness and dread and pathetic hope. Just as much as any episode of The Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959-1964), this play provokes in me considerations of consequence and personal choice. A warning in a world gone wrong, embodied here by McDowall’s performance and Serling’s writing. 

    Ten years after the launch of The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling was ready to revisit anthology television. In the intervening years since his beloved fantasy show had ended, Serling had kept busy with a variety of different projects, even though he was no longer the celebrated angry young man of the golden age of television. These projects ranged from a modern television movie adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843) reformed as a nightmare of nuclear Armageddon and a plea for cooperation between nations before mutually assured destruction, to The Loner (CBS, 1965-1966), a contemplative Western set in a this-time only figuratively haunted post-civil war America, and co-writing The Planet of the Apes (USA, Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968) amongst other films. For his new television project, this time however, Serling would move beyond fantasy and science fiction and go deep into the dark waters of horror.

    The painting of the cemetery used in the segment

    Night Gallery premiered as a television movie on November 8th, 1969. It took the form of three separate stories, linked by Serling’s narration. He presented these tales from the titular dimly lit gallery, offering us a trio of stories that all suggest not an indifferent universe, but instead one where the immoral might be able to run from their wickedness, but not, eventually, from consequences. And it’s the first of these plays we are considering today, ‘The Cemetery’, as well as the delicate and bruising performance at its centre from Roddy McDowall. Directed by Boris Sagal, it is thirty minutes of television that distills everything that makes Serling such a great writer: emotionally literate, atmospheric, wittily loquacious and unyieldingly moral. Interestingly, the British-born and raised McDowall plays his role with a lyrical Southern-tinged accent that will just as frequently tip into British pronunciation. Similarly, Serling’s tale could just as easily be set in a country house at the edge of a small English village and nothing would need to be changed to accommodate this meeting of a tradition of Southern USA and British gothic, where the older ghosts of the past, both real and imagined, leave their graves to haunt us. It could be set here, there, or anywhere.

    Introducing the segment, Serling begins: “Good evening, and welcome to a private showing of three paintings, displayed here for the first time. Each is a collector’s item in its own way—not because of any special artistic quality, but because each captures on a canvas, suspends in time and space, a frozen moment of a nightmare. Our initial offering: a small gothic item in blacks and grays, a piece of the past known as the family crypt. This one we call, simply, “The Cemetery.” Offered to you now, six feet of earth and all that it contains. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the Night Gallery…”

    William Hendricks is old and in poor health. A series of strokes have left him largely incapacitated and housebound in the family mansion. He is attended to only by his loyal butler Osmond Portifoy, with the family burial plot the view from his window and the last thing he painted. Hendricks is wealthy and had only a sister to leave his money to, or so he thought. But with his sister dead, the inheritance will now pass to her son, Jeremy, a thoroughly disreputable man. Jeremy has moved into the home and is impatiently waiting for his uncle to die, so much so that he takes matters into his own hands to make sure William relocates to his place in the cemetery sooner rather than later. After this, Portifoy learns that a miserable stipend of $80 a month is his reward for decades of faithful service. And so, it seems, Jeremy finally has the means to support the lifestyle he is accustomed to. But then Jeremy notices that painting of the house and graves hanging at the bottom of the staircase keeps changing and suggesting his uncle is not at all at rest. 

    What follows is a beautifully paced and executed Gothic tale of vengeance that for me is some of Serling’s finest writing. One of my favourite themes in his work is that of a moral universe and our choices within it. The idea that our reality is not passive, that we can make better choices but also that there are consequences for our cruelty, selfishness and inaction. Serling was frequently concerned with equality, the impact of racism and, as his wife Carol once explained, the ‘ultimate obscenity of not caring’. In The Twilight Zone, this could be a positive exploration, if we take for example the compassion and sacrifice of Lew Bookman or the universe indulging the sentimentality of Henry Corwin. But in Night Gallery it was frequently the other side of this coin. That moral universe is unrelenting in ‘Escape Route’ (the third segment in the pilot film), ‘Lone Survivor’, ‘The Doll’ or perhaps most memorably in ‘The Caterpillar’. In all of these, bad people do bad things and, perhaps not immediately but certainly inevitably, the universe revisits this on them manyfold. Serling was always a champion of the best in humanity and what we could achieve, alone and most importantly together, and believed in the next generation and their capacity to do and be better. But he was also acutely aware of our frailties and disappointments as a species, from his experiences as a far-too-young man at war, to his own personal failings, and to the impacts of racism and isolationism in the decade that birthed Night Gallery. Perhaps this is why Night Gallery largely trades in the hope and optimism found in The Twilight Zone for more of the cosmic justice seen in that show’s ‘Deaths-Head Revisited’. 

    Roddy McDowall stood next to the painting looking unsettled. In this version of the painting, a grave can be seen open, a figure lurching towards the house

    Despite this, ‘The Cemetery’ never stoops to being cruel. Enraged perhaps, and unforgiving, but not cruel. Instead, it is human and sad, much of this found in Roddy McDowall’s performance. Jeremy at first is cruel as he taunts his uncle and brings about the old man’s death. An unremarkable and embittered would-be conman, Jeremy thinks himself destined for a life of luxury he possesses neither the means nor the character for. And in his uncle, he has found the chance to fulfil this destiny. He revels in verbose cruelty, not just to his uncle but also to Portifoy, whose name he allows to roll regularly from his tongue with contempt, for the man and for the role he plays in Hendrick’s life. There’s disgust here at a man who could be a servant but also envy. After all, Jeremy has never succeeded at anything, let alone three decades at one thing. After his uncle dies and is buried, Jeremy wastes no time in having the will executed and becoming master of the house. All through this however, McDowall uses flashes of expression or a sadness in his eyes to give Jeremy inner life. There’s part of him behind the facade that is perhaps regretful, or even himself disgusted momentarily by the brutality he is capable of. But he overrides this, pushes it down, makes his choice. 

    It is soon after his uncle has died that Jeremy notices that final painting he did of the house and cemetery has changed. Something new has been added. William’s freshly dug grave has appeared on it. Jeremy asks Portifoy but Osmond says he can see nothing different. It is the beginning of the end for Jeremy. As the painting continues to alter, different each time he sees it, Jeremy has two frightening conclusions to draw. The first is unthinkable, that his uncle is not at rest and is making his way from the grave to the house to exact revenge. The second is that he is losing his mind. As he diminishes from the swaggering, arrogant swine at the segment’s opening towards an imitation of his deathly ill uncle, abandoning the fancy shirts and sharp jackets and taking on William’s wardrobe of dressing gown and blanket, McDowall invites us into Jeremy’s confusion, where both he and us can believe both at once. Pushing Portifoy too far, the butler resigns and goes to stay at a hotel in town. It is now that Jeremy is alone in the house with no one to turn to. Devolving into panic and rage and overwhelmed by fear, Jeremy has dropped all bravado, clinging to the hope Portifoy will save him. It’s a name he no longer says with contempt, but instead with desperation. 

    Jeremy’s supposedly dead uncle come to ‘life’ again in the painting

    There are many elements that for me make up why ‘The Cemetery’ is so successful at what it sets out to achieve: Serling’s words, Sagal’s assured and controlled direction, the set design and presentation, the supporting performances, the stirring and oppressive Billy Goldenberg score that mixes traditional instrumentation with atonal electronic noise. But at its core and what brings Serling’s writing to life is the complicated, human villainy in Roddy McDowall’s performance. At the start of this journey, Jeremy repulses us. At the end of it, we still despise him but pity him too and perhaps recognise ourselves more. Night Gallery may have traded hope and optimism for the finality of cosmic justice, but particularly in Serling’s work for the series, it doesn’t lose his focus on humanity. If The Twilight Zone could often be a call to arms to be better before the worst happens, Night Gallery is a warning that to be better is a journey of choice that never ends, particularly – especially – if the worst is happening now. In McDowall’s panic, fear and anger as seemingly unrelenting consequence approaches, and in that final coda sting in this tale, that warning is clear to me: it is too late for Jeremy and William and Portifoy, but not too late for us. 

    And so, I think about ‘The Cemetery’ and how art like it influences our real lives. I think about legacy and the imprints we leave on each other both while we’re here and when we’re gone. Let’s not be Jeremy, or Portifoy or Hendricks. Let’s be better. Rod Serling thought we could be, and McDowall shows us ourselves if we don’t at least try.