I’m amazed no one has mentioned what might be the creepiest (but I’ll admit “Pickman’s Model” is right up there too) “Night Gallery” episode - starring Joel Grey and Howard Duff - “There Aren’t Any More McBane’s”.
Andy McBane (Joel Grey) is a lazy graduate student and rich uncle Howard Duff is tiring of his nephew’s “do-nothing” ways so Andy is threatened with being cut off from any more of his uncle’s support and he will be disinherited.
So, Andy finds a way to summon a demon (if you had the knowledge it was always available to every McBane that ever lived) to do away with his uncle and he inherits all the wealth.
Some time goes by and we see one of the few friends Andy had at college trying to contact another friend of Andy’s. Over the phone he is told that the friend went to Africa for a job and was tragically killed by a leopard !!! This guy is starting to get creeped out and all of a sudden, the lights go out in his apartment. The guy runs out into the hall and that goes dark too. He manages to get down to the basement where everything seems safe. However, you start to hear some creepy growling then from outside, you see monstrous hands bending the steel bars protecting the basement window !! Then you start to see hazily though the window, a pair of glowing red eyes. Just when you think it is all over for this guy, the creature vanishes. Still, this guy knows that he’d better contact his friend Andy McBane to see just what the Hell is happening.
There’s more to the story - hence no spoiler boxes. It is one creepy tale. I defy anyone who has seen that story to go down their basement at 2:00 a.m. and look out their window. It’s only a story right? BWA-HA-HA !!!
The one about the older couple who cared for the wife’s uncle who had lost his legs in an industrial accident. The uncle got some sort of pension, that the couple had been living on, so when uncle dies they bury him in the basement and find a guy to take his place. They live happily ever after in their felonious benefits scam until the pension-company sends somebody to check on the uncle. The last scene is the wife is in the kitchen, whining about how she doesn’t think it’s a good idea as the husband heads upstairs with a chainsaw. Cut to the exterior of the house with chainsaw sound effects and screaming.
I saw this show when I was maybe 8 years old. I’m forty now, and I still get tense when I hear the sound of power tools.
The Ossie Davis / Roddie McDowell changing paintings one that has already been mentioned was by far the scariest to me and my friend when we were 11 or 12.
It had the “are you insane or is it really happening” part where Ossie acts like there is nothing different with the switched paintings. On top of that the Uncle is getting closer and closer and closer to the house. The creepy distortorted oil portrait when Roddy throws his glass at the painting of his uncle. Then the painting changing for Ossie after the artist has left. Now there are TWO new graves, “something” is out there, and you can see it’s progess across the creepy painting…aaaagh!
It had me freaked out for years after that if I was alone in a house.
Was there one where a guy can hide in paintings, and ends up hidden (because the painting is moved) in a painting of the crucifixtion or something else that’s equally painful and horrible?
Holy crap, that’s it! I can’t believe I actually remembered it correctly. Even the screen cap of the last scene was exactly as I remembered. And I only saw the episode once, well over 20 years ago.
One thing I *didn’t * remember was the star being Leslie Nielsen. And of course that alone pretty much destroys any chances of my being creeped out by watching it again. It’s hard enough watching **Forbidden Planet ** without imagining a young Lt. Frank Drebin. (Unfortunately, this episode doesn’t appear to be available on DVD anyway.)
Anyway, thanks for the info, Labdad! You made my day!
brief off-topic help request, here. i see the vb code language for a spoiler, but is there a way to import it into the body of the message without having to type open spoiler close spoiler every time to create the box?
oh, does and anybody remember lovecraft’s ‘cool air,’ with henry darrow as the unfortunate doctor? talk about creepy… :eek:
while we’re on the subject, i also have another show that’s stayed with me since childhood. details are fuzzy at best now some 40 years later. how good are you cafe society dopers? let’s find out.
it was the late-ish 60s. possibly an anthology series, maybe not. it had to do with the supernatural involving a man and a woman i think that investigated such thngs.
in this instance it was was about a painting that may or may not have had such leanings and i think was connected to a murder. i can recall it bleeding at one point. i remember that as if it happened five minutes ago.
eventually it was determined the whole thing was being faked and there was nothing supernatural about it. or was it? something strange happened right at the end of the episode involving that painting, although i don’t remember what it was.
I am sure I posted about this one before… titled IIRC “The Doll”- British Major kills a rebel leader. Rebel’s brother has a cursed doll sent to Little Niece/Ward of Major. Niece then tells Major that Dolly doesn’t like him. Dolly gradually grows malicious grin, while Niece wastes away. Every attempt to dispose of Dolly fails.
Finally Major grabs Dolly to throw into fire & Dolly bites his throat.
Major is dying of infected wound & sends for a witch doctor, who then sends package…
Rebel’s brother opens package & finds a doll of the Major, with a big malicious grin!
Why so scary? MY GRANDMOM HAD DOLLS ALL AROUND THE PLACE!
1.) The adaptation of Kornbluth’s The Little Black Bag was one of the best – I wish they’d done more adaptations of classic SF and Horror (and done them well). This was actually the third time that story had been adapted to TV:
2.) I was disappointed in the NG adaptations of Lovecraft. “Pickman’s Model” was shorn of its Boston roots, placed in a limbo city, and halway through it morphed into Lovecraft’s “Shadow over Innsmouth”, only with rat-people instead of fish-people. The NG adaptation of “Cool Air” played it sort of for laughs. They also did a Lovecraftian story with Carl Reiner as a professor, also going for a quick laugh. I make fun of Lovecraft all the time, but if you’re going to all the trouble of adapting him to TV or the screen, you ought to play him straight.
3.) Rod Serling wasn’t terifically happy with the series. He felt the network suits were forcing him into cheap scares and not doing any real writing or stortytelling, and were cashjing in on huis name. When NG was good – as in the pilot episode – it was really good. But whenm it was bad, like the girl with the curl (which sounds like a NG episode), it was horrid.
4.) And even though the original NG episodes could be bad, the ones in syndication could be even worse. Evidently, the Powers That Be decided that there weren’t enough episodes for syndication, so they added episodes from the TV series The Sixth Sense (no relation to the recent Shyamalan film), and had Rod Serling do intro to them (with “framed” clips from the episode in place of the paintings). These are downright painful to watch, 'ccause you know Serling hated them.
5.) NG didn’t freak me out anywhere near as much as Twilight Zone, partly because I was older, and partly because most of them were not done as well. Too many times you could tell the story was only there for the payoff, and you could see it coming from a mile away.
I don’t really have an overall favorite, although I have to admit I liked the pilot and the Earwig ones.
I’ll go along with everyone who mentioned The Cemetary. I have this on dvd and can barely stand to watch it. Another one that I don’t think anyone has mentioned is “The Hand of Borgus Weems”. I don’t remember all the particulars but it was your basic disembodied hand takes on a life of it’s own story. I haven’t seen it in 30 years, so I might find it comical today, but it sure terrified me when I was little.
I believe it was a Night Gallery episode, where E.G. Marshall is a total prick and gets his when cockroaches slowly invade his apartment.
Final scene: His body is in a bathtub inundated with the bugs and they’re crawling out of his mouth and nose!
Next time you step on a Cuccaracha think twice. Then crunch the little bastard. :dubious:
Although the episode would be laughable now, at the time as a young pre-teen, I was scared spitless after watching Fear of Spiders. I already had a raging fear of spiders of my own, and this didn’t help, especially so close to bedtime.
Spider gets washed down the drain then crawls back out bigger. Washed down again, returns even bigger, etc. Eventually the thing is the size of a dog. To this day, when washing a spider down the drain, I still watch for several minutes, just to make sure he is really gone.
