Much like Thriller, Night Gallery is an old horror anthology series that I’ve recently discovered thanks to reruns on Me-TV. Airing in the early 70s and hosted by Twilight Zone‘s Rod Serling, Night Gallery usually featured two or three stories per episode and even provided a few early credits for director Steven Spielberg.
Of course, Spielberg didn’t direct the episode below but that’s okay. It’s still pretty good. It tells two stories. In A Question of Fear, Leslie Nielsen plays a mercenary who takes a bet to spend the night in a haunted house. In The Devil Is Not Mocked, Dracula talks about how he fought the Nazis during World War II. Interestingly enough, Dracula is played by Francis Lederer who, 13 years later, played the same role in The Return of Dracula.
The episode of Night Gallery was originally broadcast on October 27th, 1971.
Through the Shattered Lens 
Nice to see this program featured. Understandbly overshadowed by the seminal (but unequalled) and classic Twilight Zone, Nightn Gallery was nonetheless a quite worthy and undersppreciated followup from Mr. Serling. Like the earlier program, some of the stories, such as “The Devil is Not Mocked”, have humorous undertones, while others were decidedly creepy (there was interesting one involvinga “shrub monster”, of sorts, that scared me as a kid), generally more so than TZ. But like TZ, many, if not most, involved som ironic/justice-serving twist, and some are classics in their own right. Two come to mind, one starring Richard Kiley, and the other Joan Crawford.
Great show. Rod Serling was a genius, and both television and film are the better for his contributions.
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Thanks, KO. I’ve been enjoying discovering the Night Gallery on Hulu.
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