I remember that; the mob boss was played by Mickey Rooney, who passed away in . . . let’s have a look. . . Jesus Christ, he’s still alive!
The one with the old lady’s shadow, forced me to tell my mom I was “too old” for a night light in my room. Up until then, the shadows it cast on my wall didn’t bother me.
IIRC in the episode, the old lady died and the son was haunted by her shadow on the wall.
That sounds right. I guess I’m just lumping similiar shows together.
“Fear of Spiders” always creeped me out. That’s the one where the guy rinses a spider down the drain of his kitchen sink, and the spider keeps coming back up, but each time it does, it’s BIGGER!
Astro, is the one you’re thinking of with the ratlike creature “A Feast of Blood”? Synopsis:
“A repulsive suitor evens the score with a calculating beauty by presenting her with an unusual gift: a fur brooch that seems almost alive.”
I remember that one very clearly. The critter on the brooch (wasn’t it called a bodey or something like that?) keeps getting bigger (hmmm, is there a theme here?). Gee, I just looked that episode up and saw that the repulsive suitor was played by Harold Lloyd – what a great actor!
Sigh. I think the Night Gallery DVD is going to be on my next birthday wish list.
That’s easy to do with those kinds of anthologies. I wasn’t sure myself until I saw Bill Door’s link (I’m still not positive).
My search was confused by the change of names. There were actually two shows Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. I was looking at the former and the episode in question was on the later.
It was also remade on the 1985 version of the show .
Nitpick: that was Norman Lloyd who’s probably best known for later playing Dr. Auschlander on “St. Elsewhere.” However, most of his work was as a producer and sometime-director for such shows as “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” He also just turned 92 a few months ago.
Jesus! I almost forgot about that one. Brrr! Baldwin tagged the one I was thinking of earler - See post # 8.
Is it just me or does something seem wrong about his IMDB page? At 88 years old he was a camera operator on the TV show Frontline? Hunting for Bin Laden? That can’t be right.
The other thing that surprised me was that such a cultured man was born in…Jersey City?
Truly, American tv would have been the lesser without Rod Serling. Too bad about the 800,000 cigarettes he smoked.
Is there a nice DVD box set? It’s not too early to think about next Christmas.
Maybe not the creepiest, but very moody: “Silent Snow, Secret Snow”, narrated by Orson Welles. A 12-year old boy retreats into his own mind where snow blankets and comforts him. Very deep (but read the original story for a slightly different ending).
Damn you yes it is!
:smack:
Thanks. St. Elsewhere is one of the things I remember him in. I had no idea he was still alive. I’m probably confusing Dr. Auschlander’s death with his!
I seem to remember that the Night Gallery ep that most freaked me out was paired with the one about the shadow on the old lady’s wall, when I saw it. I’d have to do a look-up cuz I don’t recall the name of the episode, but a woman is slowly driving herself insane by waking repeatedly in the night to hear knocking at her house door. When she goes to answer the door, she sees only a scarf, or the wispy chiffon end of a dress disappearing from the front of the house, otherwise no one is there. Eventually she discovers that:
SHE’S the one who is just disappearing from view; she is dead and haunting her own house!
That just creeped me out so much! I had nightmares about it for years.
–Beck
This thread is bringing back some great memories. I’d almost be afraid to rewatch some of my favorite episodes for fear that they might not be so creepy as I remember them.
One of the things I enjoyed is that, at least at first, not all episodes could tidily fit in the time allotted, so they’d have little “filler” episodes that were only a few minutes long. If I remember correctly, one was pretty “cheesy” and involved astronauts landing on the moon, only to be killed by a giant mouse (moon = cheese).
I’ve had bits of pieces of one episode haunting me for years (I saw it when I was maybe 6 or 7 years old), and hopefully someone here can identify it. All I can remember is that it involved a guy trapped in a house with some sort of . . . thing that was never shown. All the guy would see was a trail of slime leading in and out of rooms. For some reason I thought the creature was a giant slug, the mere thought of which terrified me. Now here’s where it gets really vague, because as I remember the ending, the guy commits suicide, either because he’s so afraid of the slug-thing or because he just went insane. Then there’s a scene of some guy on a TV (a prerecorded tape?) explaining that there was no monster, it was all faked, ha-ha, and apparently this was all designed to drive the protagonist to suicide.
Yes, I know that description makes very little sense, but I’m just reciting how I remember it. I may be remembering wrong, or blurring two episodes together – all I know for sure is that it was definitely a **Night Gallery ** episode. (Now watch someone prove *that * wrong.)
Anybody have a clue?
Yep. It starred Leslie Nielsen, as a gung-ho, soldier of fortune fellow named Col. Dennis Malloy.
From nightgallery.net: Night Gallery #12 (10-27-71) A QUESTION OF FEAR. An intrepid soldier-of-fortune accepts a $15,000 bet to stay overnight in a haunted house. Cast: Leslie Nielsen, Fritz Weaver.
Turned out that Fritz Weaver’s father was a concert pianist in eastern Europe, and Nielsen had tortured him by setting his hands on fire. The bet to stay in the “haunted house” was a ruse to allow Weaver to get revenge on Nielsen by injecting him with a potion that would dissolve all his bone tissue, but leave everything else intact, essentially turning him into a human slug. Nielsen committed suicide rather than allow it to happen, but there was no such potion. It was all a bluff.
Here’s a screencap of that last scene.
Was there one with a gorilla? If so, it gave me nightmares. (if not, I had some gorilla nightmares for some other / no reason)
Brian
Another that didn’t frighten me particularly but was memorable for its take on the vampire legend, was the one with a very young Lesley Anne Warren in it…she’s a vampire stranded on a skiff or pontoon of some sort near a dock because she can only cross water at either low tide or at one particular phase of the moon, I don’t recall which. She gets a sailor to fall for her, as I recall. I just remember her dresses being so “70’s” in the episode, brightly colored and paisley, I believe. Kind of a sexy, talky episode, but it has stuck in my mind all these years. I didn’t figure out that the vampire was Leslie Anne Warren for years, then read somewhere, much later on, that she’d appeared in that episode.
Sigh. Makes me want to get the series on DVD, now, too!
–Beck