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DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 1, NO. 19 HALLOWEEN SPECIAL |
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PICKS THE ALL-TIME BEST TV HORRORS |
On rare occasions, TV can scare you just as much as the movies
By
RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
There's nothing about the television medium that suggests it can't scare the bejesus out of you anytime it wants to--except for all the rules and regulations imposed on it by government regulators and timid network executives who fear government regulators.
Think about it: Is "Psycho" any less scary if you see it on a good-sized TV screen, hopefully unedited and uninterrupted? In some ways, it might be even scarier because you don't have all the other people in the audience to keep you from feeling alone with Norman Bates.
Still, those rules and regulations have kept the TV networks from scaring us as regularly as we're scared by movies on the big screen. Yet there are some very significant exceptions to the rule. Here are five of them:
1. INTENSITY (1997)
This
is by far the scariest made-for-TV movie I've ever seen, but
not a lot of people saw it because it was on a low-rated network
(Fox) and was telecast as a two-part, four-hour miniseries in
the summer of 1997 when most people were on vacation. Faithfully
adapted from Dean Koontz's most terrifying non-supernatural novel,
"Intensity" was inspired by the real-life serial murderer
Ed Kemper, who terrorized California's Santa Cruz County in the
1970s, and by events of Koontz's own childhood, when he was threatened
with death by his alcoholic father. His hero in "Intensity"
is a young woman (Molly Parker) who narrowly escapes death during
the mass murder of a family by murderous Edgler Vest (John C.
McGinley), then discovers she's hidden in his motor home and
soon may join his long list of victims. The opening sequence
in which Molly hides under a bed as Vest methodically slaughters
the family of her best friend, unaware that she's a weekend guest,
is almost unbearably frightening. And the terror doesn't diminish
once she becomes a prisoner in the killer's remote country house,
where he maintains a torture chamber--and keeps one other doomed
prisoner alive for his kinky pleasures. Don't watch this alone!
2. TRILOGY OF TERROR (1975)
If producer-director Dan Curtis ("Dark Shadows") had made none of his many other television horror films, his reputation as a frightmeister would still be imposing just from this 1975 trilogy of short horror stories by Richard Matheson ("I Am Legend," "The Shrinking Man"), all starring actress Karen Black at the peak of her popularity. In fact, he'd still be considered a master if he'd made only one of the three segments: "Prey," in which Black is trapped in her apartment and pursued by a homicidal, bloodthirsty little African Zuni doll, armed with a razor-sharp blade. If that sounds too silly to be true, just watch it alone and live to regret it! That segment obviously inspired the "Chucky" films of later years. Ultimately, the memory of that brief, terrifying segment grew so much over the years that Curtis finally produced a sequel moe than two decades later--"Trilogy of Terror II" (1996) for the USA network--that revived the Zuni doll for a new reign of terror.
3. DUEL (1971)
Writer
Richard Matheson also was behind this memorably harrowing TV
movie made by then unknown Steven Spielberg for Universal when
he was barely out of his teens. In the deceptively simple storyline,
motorist Dennis Weaver is driving down the freeway when he suddenly
realizes he has done something to anger the driver of a huge
truck and trailer rig. For the rest of the movie, Weaver is running
for his life as the trucker attempts to run him down, drive him
off the road or smash him to smithereens. The longer the "duel"
continues, the more we come to realize there is no driver behind
the wheel of that truck and Weaver is being tormented by a demonic
presence. Years later, Americans would come to recognize a phenomenon
called "road rage" as an outgrowth of our intensely
mobile, wheel-dependent society. Matheson
and Spielberg were way ahead of us with "Duel," which
must have scared millions of motorists into pulling off the road
at the very sight of a trucker in the rear view mirror.
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4. SALEM'S LOT (1979)
Stephen King was the hottest young author in America when CBS decided to turn his second bestseller (after "Carrie") into a TV miniseries, even though no network had ever done anything quite like it before. "Salem's Lot"--the actual title should be "'salem's Lot" because the first word is an abreviation of "Jerusalem"--is about the slow, methodical ruination of a small New England town by an ancient vampire and his minions. David Soul, then very popular from his "Starsky & Hutch" TV series, played the novelist who comes to town and discovers what's going on behind the cobwebs. With him is teenage Lance Kerwin, the star of NBC's "James at 15." Barlow (Reggie Nalder), the vampire, is a rat-faced Nosferatu-type, but his in-town aide is the smooth, cultured James Mason. Director Tobe Hooper ("The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," "Poltergeist") used a magnificent supporting cast that included Bonnie Bedelia, Lew Ayres, Ed Flanders, Kenneth McMillan, Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook and Fred Willard. This has many ghastly sequences and a sort of majesty that TV vampire flicks seldom have equalled since.
5. WHEN A STRANGER CALLS BACK (1993)
Unconcerned by the rules inhibiting broadcasters, the commercial-free Showtime pay TV network permitted director Fred Walton to do an edge-of-your-seat sequel to his 1979 feature film thriller "When A Stranger Calls" that remains one of the all-time scariest "trapped in your own house" horror movies. Walton also braided together several strands from his original, giving purists a special feeling that the sequel definitely was linked to the original. In the 1979 film, babysitter Carol Kane is terrorized by a phone freak--then discovers he's been calling from inside the house! Kane returns in the sequel and so does Charles Durning, the police detective who worked the original case, to help babysitter Jill Schoelen when she seems to be the latest victim of the same psycho from 14 years earlier.
© 2000 by Ron Miller. Photo from "Intensity" © 1997 by Fox Broadcasting. Photo from "Salem's Lot" © 1979 by CBS.
RON MILLER is the author of "Mystery! A Celebration" and in his 40 years as a journalist did in-person interviews with some of the greatest stars of horror films, including Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine and Vincent Price. You can find out how to order autographed copies of his book by clicking the SHOPPING MALL button below.
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