Warren Burton | Through the Shattered Lens

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing Freddy’s Nightmares, a horror anthology show which ran in syndication from 1988 to 1990. The entire series can be found on Tubi!

This week, it’s Halloween in Springwood!

Episode 2.4 “Photo Finish”

(Dir by Tom DeSimone, originally aired on October 29th, 1989)

This episode starts with Freddy welcoming us to a special Halloween episode of Freddy’s Nightmares. Because it is the season, Freddy actually plays a role in both of this week’s stories and it must be said that they are both rather gruesome, even by the standards of this show.

In the first story, photographer Stoney Adler (Patty McCormack) is commissioned to take some photos for a Halloween spread that will appear in Kink Magazine. Stoney is amazed at how good her models are at pretending to be scared. That’s because they’re all actually terrified because they keep seeing Freddy. Stoney isn’t aware of Freddy’s presence, at least not until Freddy drives a stake through the heart of one of her models. Stoney tries to avoid doing any more horror shoots but she takes on one final assignment. Freddy appears and asks Stoney, “Do you want me to make (the model) scream?” Stoney says yes. Freddy plucks out Stoney’s eyes. That certainly does lead to some screaming.

The second story feature three FBI men trying to figure out why a suburban father shot his wife and daughter the night before Halloween and then apparently slit his own throat. One of the agents — a profiler who owes more than a little to William Petersen’s performance in Manhunter — figures out that Freddy possessed the father. Freddy, however, then possesses another one of the FBI agents and the tragedy plays out a second time. The profiler ends up with his throat slashed, slowly dying while the camera lingers on him. There’s no way this episode didn’t inspire a few nightmares.

This was a good episode. It was scary, it was gory, and it was definitely designed to offend people who weren’t into horror. This episode was exactly what you would want Halloween with Freddy Krueger to be. The second season continues to be a hundred times better than the first.

Tonight’s excursion into televised horror is the 16th episode of the 2nd season of HBO’s Tales From The Crypt!

Television Terror, which originally aired on July 17th, 1990, tells the story of Horton Rivers (Morton Downey, Jr.) Horton has his own television show, one where he hunts for ghosts and seeks proof of the supernatural. Needless to say, Horton’s a big fake, a nonbeliever who loathes his audience. It’s kind of like Ghost Hunters, except for the fact that — over the course of this episode — Horton actually finds something. Or perhaps we should say that something find Horton…

Needless to say, things do not end well.

Television Terror has a lot of atmosphere and, with its theme of venal television hosts and gullible audiences, it’s probably even more relevant today than when it was first broadcast.

Enjoy!