For tonight’s televised horror on the lens, we have another episode of the Night Gallery. In Whisper, a mentally unstable woman played by Sally Field believes that she can talk to ghosts. Her husband, played by Dean Stockwell, spends all of his time driving her to cemeteries and allowing her to commune with the dead. Is he merely humoring her or does he believe as well?
You’ll have to watch to find out!
Whisper was originally broadcast on May 13th, 1973.
Up until Friday, I had either never heard of a show called Freakylinks. According to Wikipedia, it aired on the Fox Network back in the year 2000 and it deal with a guy named Derek (Ethan Embry) who took over an occult-themed web site after the death of his twin brother Adam. The name of that website: Freakylinks.com. (Incidentally, the real Freakylinks.com is currently for sale if anyone wants to buy the domain name. To be honest, Freakylinks.com sounds like it should be a cheap porn site instead of a paranormal site.) With the help of his friends, Derek would spend each week investigating paranormal stuff and then I guess posting it to his site. I’m assuming that there was no YouTube back in 2000. (And according to Wikipedia, I am correct! YouTube did not start until 2005.)
Anyway, Friday night, I watched an episode of Freakylinks with my friends Janeen, Holly, Ven, Tammy, Elway, Kurt, Amber, Myrna, and Bec over at SyFyDesigns.com. As you might guess from that list, Freakylinks appears to be one of those shows that works better if you watch it as a part of a group. The episode we watched was called Still I Rise and it had a zombie theme to it. Towards the end of the episode, Ethan Embry goes a little crazy.
And you can watch it below!
For today’s televised horror, we have another episode of a show that I loved when I was growing up! In this episode of Sabrina, The Teenage Witch, Sabrina attempts to hold a Halloween party and ends up having to give marriage advice to Frankenstein and his wife!
This episode was originally broadcast on October 27th, 2000.
In this episode of The Twilight Zone, the Earth has somehow gotten off of orbit is now being drawn closer and closer to the sun. With humanity on the verge of extinction, two women (Lois Nettleton and Betty Garde) struggle to survive as the heat keeps rising.
Full of haunting images of a deserted and sun-baked city, The Midnight Sun is one of the few episodes of The Twilight Zone that has ever given me nightmares. For some reason, the melting painting always gets to me.
This episode was written by Rod Serling and directed by Anton Leader. It was originally broadcast on November 17th, 1961.
Tonight’s episode of the Twilight Zone was originally broadcast on January 24th, 1963 and it’s one of the rare hour-long episodes of the original Twilight Zone. In He’s Alive, a very young Dennis Hopper plays Peter Vollmer, an aspiring Neo-Nazi who isn’t having much luck bringing fascism to America until he meets a mysterious benefactor who teaches him the tricks of the trade.
It’s a pretty good (if heavy-handed) episode, distinguished by both Dennis Hopper’s lead performance and a message that is probably even more relevant today than when the show was first broadcast.
This episode was written by Rod Serling and directed by Stuart Rosenberg.
Tonight’s episode of The Twilight Zone is a political allegory about a communist dictator in Central America who gets a magic mirror that, he believes, will reveal who is plotting against me. It’s undeniably heavy-handed but, at the same time, it’s a lot of fun to watch Peter Falk play Fidel Castro.
This episode was written by Rod Serling and directed by Don Medford. It was originally broadcast on October 20th, 1961.
When I first decided to devote some of October to featuring horror related TV shows, I knew that I’d have to include at least one episode of the classic Nickelodeon TV series Are You Afraid of the Dark? Back in the 90s, Are You Afraid of The Dark? was the best because it was a show about scary things but it was on Nickelodeon so you could watch it without having to worry about your mom coming in the room and making you change the channel.
This episode of Afraid of the Dark continues this sort of mini-vampire theme that we’ve got going. The Tale of the Nightly Neighbors was originally broadcast on October 3rd, 1992.
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.
It’s time for another episode of Beyond Belief! This episode was originally broadcast on July 22nd, 2002 and host Jonathan Frakes appears to be even more amused with it all than usual!
Can you figure out what’s fact and what’s fiction?
I used to love watching Sabrina The Teenage Witch when I was younger! This was mostly because I wanted to grow up to be a teenage witch.
Sabrina’s very first Halloween episode was first broadcast on October 25th, 1996. In A Halloween Story, Sabrina must use magic (surprise! surprise!) in order to be able to attend two Halloween parties at the same time. As so often happens with Sabrina, the laughs are surprisingly clever and the ending is nicely heart-warming.
Through the Shattered Lens 