Friday 8 October 2010

Fear on Friday - Televisual Terrors

Many thanks for the comments on last week's post; I see that I shall have to check out Thomas Ligotti forthwith.

This week, I'm turning my attention to television. Being of a certain age, I was lucky enough to be in my early teens when the great scary TV shows of the mid to late seventies were coming out. Stuff like Sapphire and Steel (specifically the one with the abandoned railway station and the one about the entity that can trap you inside photographs), Doctor Who (The Green Death and the Ark in Space stick out in my mind), The Omega Factor (in which a team of scientists investigate the paranormal and get more than they bargained for). I was only seven when The Stone Tape came out so never got to watch it but I'm told that authorities on the genre praise it as a very scary piece of work indeed.

TV moves us one step further from the kind of imaginative playground that books evoke; with the written word, much of the visualisation is done inside our own minds, whereas on TV, we are forced, to a certain extent to accept the visual opinion of the writer and director. That's probably why a lot of what I found scary as a youngster derives its initial premise from everyday reality - I could imagine that somewhere, perhaps quite nearby, the events of the programme could actually be happening.

More recently, I found the three-part Crooked House by Mark Gatiss (League of Gentlemen and occasional Dr Who writer for the new series) able to crank up the heart-rate quite considerably. It combined a creeping sense of menace with some serious shocks and an excellent twist at the very end which made the watching all the more worthwhile.

Crooked House occupied the slot where usually sit the BBC dramatisation of M R James ghost stories for Christmas. James' stories, which I quite like for their quaint and generally understated effect, work particularly well on TV, especially the ones with the framing device of Christopher Lee as James, telling the stories to his undergraduate students.

So, being British, my recollections are of UK programmes; I'm sure that my US readers will have fond memories of TV shows that have scared them witless over the years. Please feel free to share...

(next week, I'll be moving on to the cinema)

15 comments:

  1. Sapphire and Steel - the one with the biotech creature controlling a flat, ugh -something about that chilled me.

    Crooked House - Good shout !

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  2. The Auton stories were the ones that I found really creepy. And the culty ones like The Dæmons or the one with the Ogri.

    Over here, Friday the 13th: The Series, was kind of good: really mundane items, like quilts(!!!), killing people.

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  3. Unsolved Mysteries! You have the creepy theme music, Robert Stack's narration, and true stories about ghosts, monsters, and mysterious murders and disappearances.

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  4. Sapphire & Steel was magnificent stuff, the faceless man episode was pure nightmare fuel for the wife.

    Slightly more contemporary and obscure that I've looted for games includes American Gothic and Strange - both have that normal on the surface, really wrong underneath feel...

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  5. I grew up in America during the late 60s and early 70s, and one of my earliest memories is watching the 1960s ABC TV soap opera Dark Shadows with my grandmother. It was much scarier when I was a five year old than it was many years later when I watched the reruns on the SciFi (now SyFy) Channel as an adult. Prior to that, I remember while reading the classic module I6 Ravenloft and later its not so classic follow up I10 Ravenloft II that I couldn't help thinking the authors were clearly fans of the Dark Shadows soap opera as teens (who, like my older cousins, probably raced home from school to catch the show in the late afternoon).

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  6. Nigel Kneale's The Stone Tape from your side of the Atlantic is great if you haven't seen it.

    Don't Be Afraid of the Dark doesn't nothing to promote the suggestion of its title with its tiny, whispering demons. Guillermo Del Toro is producing a bigscreen adaption.

    Some episodes of The X-Files were very atmospheric, though others much less so.

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  7. 'Tales of the Unexpected' definitely had it's disturbing moments, too.

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  8. @Biopunk - totally agree, especially about the one with the taxidermist landlady. The TV episode went that little bit further than the short story on which it was based and totally spooked me out.

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  9. Tales from the crypt, a brief series called 'short and curlies' in the early nineties, xfiles and neverwhere by neil gaiman creeped me out quite a bit.

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  10. Neverwhere was on TV? This is news to me! I liked that book (not quite as much as Roofworld, by Christopher Fowler), but it was a good tale.

    Thanks for the info.

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  11. @Biopunk - yeah, 1996, apparently. I watched the first episode, didn't think much to it. It was developed by Gaiman and Lenny Henry, then novelised by Gaiman which is probably the book you read. It suffered from being filmed on video, which gave it a rather studio feel, as opposed to the filmic realism we're used to today.

    I dimly remembered Roofworld - never read it but I'll have to check it out. I have the Borrible Trilogy by de Larrebeiti which is recommended (hard to get hold of these days but it's still in print).

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  12. Lenny Henry? I'm even more interested.

    And as to being filmed in video, it couldn't be worse than some of the mid 80's Doctor Who episodes, could it?

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  13. @Biopunk - you can find short bits on youtube and maybe follow the links from there to other excerpts to get a feel for the production values. I found I just couldn't warm to it. YMMV.

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  14. Malcolm Tucker is the Angel!?! Woohoo! Sold.

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  15. @ Biopunk: Yeah I think it was he who made me shit a brick. At the time I was just a kid, and production quality was what it was, it was scary enough.

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