by Stephen King
Horror has not fared particularly well on TV, if you except something like the six o'clock news, where footage of black GIs with their legs blown off, villages and kids on fire, bodies in trenches, and whole swatches of jungle being coated with good old Agent Orange sent kids into the streets, where they would march and light candles and say dopey, talismanic "in" things to each other until we withdrew, the North Vietnamese took over, and more starvation on mass levels resulted--not to mention opening the way for such really upstanding, humanitarian personages as Cambodia's Pol Pot. The whole sour stew sure wasn't much like a TV show, was it? Just ask yourself if any chain of events so ridiculous could ever have happened on Hawaii Five-O. The answer is of course not. If Steve McGarrett had been President from 1968 to 1976, the whole abortion could have been avoided. Steve, Danny, and Chin Ho would have cleared the mess up.
The sort of horrors we have been discussing in this book labor under the very fact of their unreality (a fact which Harlan Ellison himself recognizes well; he refuses to allow the word fantasy to be printed on book covers as a description term for the stories inside). We have treated the question "Why do you want to write horror stories in a world that is so full of real horrors?"; I am now suggesting that the reason horror has done so poorly, by and large, on TV, is a statement which is closely related to that question, to wit: "It is very difficult to write a successful horror story in a world which is so full of real horrors." A ghost in the turret room of a Scottish castle just cannot compete with thousand-megaton warheads, CBW bugs, or nuclear power plants that have apparently been put together from Aurora model kits by ten-year-olds with poor eye-hand coordination. Even Old Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre pales beside those dead sheep in Utah, killed by one of Our Finer Nerve Gases. If the wind had been blowing the other way when that happened, Salt Lake City might have gotten a really good dose of what killed the sheep. And, my good friends, someday the wind is not going to be blowing the right way. You may count on it; tell your Congressman I said so. Sooner or later the wind always changes.
Well, horror can be done. That emotion can still be triggered by people who are dedicated to doing it, and there's something optimistic in the fact that people can still, in spite of all the world's real horrors, be brought to the point of the scream by something that is patently impossible. It can be done by the writer or the director . . . if their hands are untied.
For the writer, the most galling thing about TV must be that he or she is forbidden from bringing all of his or her powers to bear, the predicament of the TV writer is strikingly similar to the predicament of the human race as envisioned in Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron," where bright people are fitted with electro-shock caps to disrupt their thinking periodically, agile people are fitted with weights, and people with great artistic talent are forced to wear heavy, distorting glasses to destroy their clearer perception of the world around them. As a result, a perfect state of equality has been achieved . . . but at what a price.
The ideal writer for the TV medium is a fella or a gal with a smidgen of talent, a lot of gall, and the soul of a drone. In Hollywood's current and exquisitely vulgar parlance, he or she must "give good meeting." Let any of these qualifications be tampered with, and the writer is apt to start feeling like poor old Harrison Bergeron. It has made Ellison, who wrote for Star Trek, The Outer Limits, and The Young Lawyers, to name just a few, a little bit crazy, I think. But if he weren't, it would be impossible to respect him. His craziness is a kind of Purple Heart, like Joseph (Police Story) Wambaugh's ulcers. There is no reason why a writer cannot make a living doing TV on a constant week-in-week-out basis; all that writer really needs is a low Alpha-wave pattern and a perception of writing as the mental equivalent of bucking crates of soda up onto a Coca-Cola truck.
Part of this is the result of federal regulation and part of it is proof of the maxim which states that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. TV is in almost every American home, and the financial stakes are enormous. As a result, television has become more and more cautious over the years. It has become like a fat old spayed tomcat dedicated to the preservation of the status quo and to the concept of LOP--Least Objectionable Programming. Television is, in fact, like that fat, wimpy kid who most of us can remember from our childhood neighborhoods, the big, slack kid who would cry if you gave him two-for-flinching, the kid who always looked guilty when the teacher asked who put the mouse in her drawer, the kid who was always picked on because he was always afraid of being picked on.
Now the simple fact of horror fiction in whatever medium you choose . . . the bedrock of horror fiction, we might say, is simply this: you gotta scare the audience. Sooner or later you gotta put on the gruesome mask and go booga-booga. I can remember an official in the fledgling New York Mets organization worrying about the improbable crowds that gang of happy-go-lucky schmucks was drawing. "Sooner or later we're going to have to sell these people some steak along with the sizzle," was how this fellow expressed it. The same is true with horror. The reader will not feed forever on innuendo and vapors; sooner or later even the great H. P. Lovecraft had to produce whatever was lurking in the crypt or in the steeple.
Most of the great film directors in the field have chosen to get the horror up front; to cram a large block of it down the viewer's throat until he almost chokes on it and then lead the viewer on, teasing him, drawing every cent of the psychological interest due on that original scare.
The primer that every would-be horror director studies in this matter is, of course, the definitive horror film of the period we're discussing--Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Here is a movie where blood was kept to a minimum and terror was kept to a maximum. In the famous shower scene we see Janet Leigh; we see the knife; but we never see the knife in Janet Leigh. You may think you saw it, but you did not. Your imagination saw it, and that is Hitchcock's great triumph. All the blood we see in the shower is swirling down the drain.1
Psycho has never been shown during prime time at a network movie, but once that forty-five seconds in the shower has been removed, the film could almost be a made-for-TV movie (in content, anyway; in terms of style, it is light-years from the run-of-the-tube TV flick). In effect, what Hitchcock does is serve us a big raw steak of terror not even halfway through his film. The rest, even the climax, is really only sizzle. And without that forty-five seconds, the film becomes nearly humdrum. In spite of its reputation, Psycho is an admirably restrained horror movie; Hitchcock even elected to shoot in black and white so that the blood in the shower scene would not look like blood at all, and one oft-told tale--almost surely apocryphal--is that Hitch toyed with shooting the movie in color--except for the shower scene, which would be in black and white.
As we enter upon our discussion of horror on television, always keep this fact somewhere near to hand: television has really asked the impossible of its handful of horror programs--to terrify without really terrifying, to horrify without really horrifying, to sell audiences a lot of sizzle and no steak.
Earlier on I said I could rationalize if not excuse the fact of Ellison's TV and my own, and the rationalization goes back to what I've already said about really awful movies. Of course, TV is far too homogenized to cough up anything as charmingly awful as The Giant Spider Invasion with its fur-covered Volkswagen, but every now and then talent shines through and something good turns up . . . and even if the something is not out-and-out good, like Spielberg's Duel or John Carpenter's Someone's Watching Me, the viewer may find at least some cause for hope. More Child than adult in pursuit of his particular taste, hope springs eternal in the breast of the fantasy-horror fan. You tune in, knowing almost certainly that it's going to be bad yet hoping against hope--irrationally--that it is going to be good. Excellence occurs surely, but every now and then a program will come along which at least bucks the odds enough to produce something interesting, such as the late-1979 NBCTV movie The Aliens Are Coming. Every now and then we are given some cause for hope.
> And with that hope to guard us against the dreck like a magic talisman, let us go and make our visit. Just close your eyes while we dance through the cathode tube here; it has a bad habit of first hypnotizing and then anesthetizing.
Just ask Harlan.
2
Probably the best horror series ever put on TV was Thriller, which ran on NBC from September of 1960 until the summer of 1962--really only two seasons plus reruns. It was a period before television began to face up to an increasing barrage of criticism about its depiction of violence, a barrage that really began with the JFK assassination, grew heavier following the assassinations of RFK and Martin Luther King, and finally caused the medium to dissolve into a sticky syrup of situation comedies--history may record that dramatic television finally gave up the ghost and slid down the tubes with a hearty cry of "Na-noo, na-noo!"
The contemporaries of Thriller were also weekly bloodbaths; it was the time of The Untouchables, starring Robert Stack as the unflappable Eliot Ness and featuring the gruesome deaths of hoodlums without number (1959-1963); Peter Gunn (1958-1961); and Cain's Hundred (1961-1962), to name just a few. It was TV's violent era. As a result, after a slow first thirteen weeks, Thriller was able to become something more than the stock imitation of Alfred Hitchcock Presents that it was apparently meant to be (early episodes dealt with cheating husbands trying to hypnotize their wives into walking over high cliffs, poisoning Aunt Martha to inherit her fortune so that the gambling debts could be paid off, and all that tiresome sort of thing) and took on a tenebrous life of its own. For the brief period of its run between January of 1961 and April of 1962--perhaps fifty-six of its seventy-eight total episodes--it really was one of a kind, and its like was never seen on TV again.
Thriller was an anthology-format show (as all of the supernatural-terror TV programs which have enjoyed even a modicum of success have been) hosted by Boris Karloff. Karloff had appeared on TV before quite often, beginning after the Universal horror wave of the early to mid-thirties finally ran weakly out in that series of comedies in the late forties. One earlier program, telecast on the fledgling ABC-TV network, had a brief run in the autumn of 1949. It was originally titled Starring Boris Karloff, fared no better following a title change to Mystery Playhouse Starring Boris Karloff, and was canceled. In feeling and tone, however, it was startlingly similar to Thriller, which came along eleven years later. Here is the summary of one plot from Starring Boris Karloff; it might as well be a Thriller episode: An English hangman unduly enjoys his work, which brings him payment of five guineas per hanging. He revels in the snap of the victim's neck, and the dangling arms. When his pregnant wife discovers his true occupation she leaves him. Twenty years later the hangman is called upon to execute a young man, which he does with pleasure, despite the fact that he has secret evidence (of the youth's innocence). . . . Only then is he confronted by his ex-wife, who tells him he has just hung his own son. Enraged, he strangles his wife and is subsequently sent to the gallows himself. Another hangman collects five golden guineas.2
The plot is kissing cousin to an episode from Thriller's second season. In that one, the executioner was French, in charge of the guillotine instead of the gallows, and was presented as a sympathetic character (although his work has apparently not affected his appetite; he's a mountain of a man). He is due to execute a particularly foul murderer the next day at dawn. The killer has not given up hope, however; his girlfriend has wormed her way into the lonely herdsman's affections, and the two of them hope to take advantage of an old loophole in the law (and I should say here that I have no idea if the loophole is a genuine one, like the American concept of double jeopardy, or simply the plot device of Cornell Woolrich, who wrote the story) which holds that if the executioner croaks on the day he is to do business, that day's condemned prisoner walks free.
The lady serves the executioner a huge breakfast laced with strong poison. He eats heartily, as usual, and then sets off for the prison. He's halfway there when the first agonizing pains strike. The rest of the episode is a chilly exercise in suspense as the camera cuts back and forth between the cell of the condemned man and the executioner's agonized walk through the streets of Paris. The executioner, obviously a type-A personality, is determined to do his duty.
He reaches the prison, collapses halfway across the courtyard . . . and then begins to crawl toward the guillotine. The prisoner is brought out, dressed in the proper open-collared white shirt (the screenwriter had obviously read his Tale of Two Cities) and the two of them converge at the guillotine. Now at the end of his rope (ha-ha), the executioner nevertheless manages to get the screaming prisoner's head in the stock and positioned over the basket before collapsing, stone dead.
The condemned prisoner, on his knees with his butt poking up--looking a bit like a turkey caught in a shakepole fence--begins screaming that he's free! Free, do you bear? Ah-hah-hah-hah! The doctor who was to pronounce the condemned dead now finds himself called upon to perform that duty upon the erstwhile executioner. He tries for a pulse and finds none--but when he drops the executioner's wrist, it falls on the guillotine's lever. The blade swishes down--thud! We fade out, knowing that rough justice has been done.
Karloff was seventy-four at the beginning of Thriller's two-year run, and not in the best of health; he suffered from a chronically bad back and had to wear weights to stand upright. Some of these infirmities dated back to his original film appearance as Frankenstein's monster in 1931. He no longer starred in all the programs--many of the guest stars on the Thriller program were nonentities who went on to become full-fledged nobodies (one of those guest stars, Reggie Nalder, went on to play the vampire Barlow in the CBS-TV film version of 'Salem's Lot)--but fans will remember a few memorable occasions when he did ("The Strange Door," for instance). The old magic was still there, still intact. Lugosi might have finished his career in misery and poverty, but Karloff, despite a few embarrassments like The Snake People, went out as he came in: as a gentleman.
Produced by William Frye, Thriller was the first television program to discover the goldmine in those back issues of Weird Tales, the memory of which had been kept alive up until then mostly in the hearts of fans, a few quickie paperback anthologies, and, of course, in those limited-edition Arkham House anthologies. One of the most significant things about the Thriller series from the standpoint of the horror fan was that it began to depend more and more upon the work of writers who had published in those "shudder pulps". . . the writers who, in the period of the twenties, thirties, and forties, had begun to guide horror out of the Victorian-Edwardian ghost-story channel it had been in for so long, and toward our modern perception of what the horror story is and what it should do. Robert Bloch was represented by "The Hungry Glass," a story in which the mirrors of an old house harbor a grisly secret; Robert E. Howard's "Pigeons from Hell," one of the finest horror stories of our century, was adapted, and remains the favorite of many who remember Thriller with fondness.3 Other episodes include "A Wig for Miss DeVore," in which a red wig keeps an actress magically young . . . until the final five minutes of the program, when she loses it--and everything else. Miss DeVore's lined, sunken face; the young man staggering blindly down the stairs of the decaying bayou mansion with a hatchet buried in his head ("Pigeons from Hell"); the fellow who sees the faces of his fellow men and women turned into hideous monstrosities when he puts on a special pair of glasses ("The Cheaters," from another Bloch story)--these may not have constituted fine art, but in Thriller's run, we find those qualities appreciated above all others by fans of the genre: a literate story coupled with the genuine desire to frighten the viewer into spasms.
Years after Thriller, a production company associated with NBC--the network upon which Thriller was telecast--optioned three stories from my 1978 collection, Night Shift, and invited me to do the screenplay. One of these stories was a piece called "Strawberry Spring," about a psychopathic Jack-the-Ripper-type killer who is roaming a fogbound college campus. About a month after turning the
script in, I got a call from an NBC munchkin at Standards and Practices (read: The Department of Censorship). The knife my killer used to commit his murders had to go, the munchkin said. The killer could stay, but the knife had to go. Knives were too phallic. I suggested we turn the killer into a strangler. The munchkin evinced great enthusiasm. I hung up, feeling like a very brilliant fellow, and turned the stabber into a strangler. The script was finally coughed out of the network's large and voracious gullet by Standards and Practices, however, strangler and all. Too gruesome and intense was the final verdict.
I guess none of them remembered Patricia Barry in "A Wig for Miss DeVore."
3
Blackness on the TV screen.
Then there's a picture there--some kind of picture--but it's rolling helplessly at first, then losing horizontal resolution.
Black again, broken by a single wavy white line, oscillating hypnotically.