Thriller Journal, Entry 1 (Episodes 1-7)

In the 1950s, the anthology was king. The dominant genre of the newborn television medium, it allowed viewers to chime in at their whim and catch an entire story in the span of an hour (or an hour and a half in the case of the prestige series Playhouse 90, which famously presented Rod Serling's Emmy winning "Requiem For a Heavyweight", among other classic dramas). There were genres that dealt in half-hours like westerns and sitcoms; shows like Gunsmoke and I Love Lucy had returning characters people could fall in love with, but every story was episodic, wrapped up within the half-hour. Anthologies thrived because they could be made quickly and easily, and were an easy sell because of their disposal nature. As EC Comics' tales of horror and pulp genre fiction made an impact on news and books stands throughout the '50s, their influence spread to television. Science fiction anthologies arrived early, in Tales of Tomorrow (1951-1953) and Science Fiction Theatre (1955-1957). Horror arrived a little later, in ABC's One Step Beyond and CBS' The Twilight Zone, both 1959 debuts. NBC was already home to the long-running Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which dabbled in horror but more frequently dealt in stories of suspense, mystery, crime and thrillers. These three anthologies were all half-hours. NBC doubled down on their own success as well as the national interest in scarier storytelling by launching an anthology that would air immediately following Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Highly uncommon for speculative fiction anthologies, this series ran for an hour (it might have even been the first in American television). To help give it an air of credibility, NBC brought in another charismatic legend of suspense to host this series: Boris Karloff.

Now in his early 70s, elder statesman of horror Boris Karloff was on the cusp of a late career renascence. Universal's 1930s classics such as Dracula and Frankenstein had been re-released in cinemas and were playing on television; these old movies with creaky cobweb infested castles were in vogue again. And so was Boris. Following his stint hosting Thriller, he starred in memorable horror vehicles directed by Roger Corman (The Terror and The Raven), Jacques Tourneur (The Comedy of Terrors), and Mario Bava (Black Sabbath). He gained a special sort of immortality voicing the Grinch in Chuck Jones' How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, and he made a poignant denouement-of-sorts in Peter Bogdonavich's Targets (the second-last film he starred in that was released in his lifetime). In Thriller, after the cold open scene, Karloff walks into the frame with a projected clip highlighting the actors playing silently behind him. He lays out this week's premise and introduces the cast, before signing off with a variation on, "I guarantee you, it'll be a thriller!". If your familiarity with anthology host segments is through Rod Serling, you're not going to see flowery language and abstract-to-blatant summations of thesis. Boris Karloff is a more matter-of-fact host, as well as an accomplished actor, and convincingly hypes the ensuing story with enthusiastic glee.

Arthur Hiller, who went on to direct movies including Love Story (1970), The Hospital (1971) and the Richard Pryor/Gene Wilder comedy See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989), worked first in television. He directed 6 episodes of Playhouse 90 and 17 episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Perhaps it was because of the latter job's experience that someone chose him to start Thriller. He directed three episodes for the series, 1.01, 1.02, and 1.05. Today, the show's legacy, as a classic horror series, was helped in part by Stephen King. In his 1981 sorta-memoir sorta-reflections on writing and genre Danse Macabre, he calls Thriller the scariest TV series and the one that satisfies most as pure horror (while he does also give praise to The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone, he explains they succeed mostly as horror/sci-fi blends, and in the case of the latter, morality plays disguised as genre). So, knowing this reputation going in, Thriller's first few episodes are surprisingly (and disappointingly) straight drama. As they build into crime saga, human interest, or pulpy thriller, it's in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock, or more accurately, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. For a series hosted by a man most commonly associated with playing Frankenstein's Monster and then developed a successful career from that role, there is a strange disconnect in what Karloff's recognition and intros suggest, and what the show then immediately delivered.

In "The Twisted Image" (1.01, written by James P. Cavanagh, directed by Arthur Hiller, September 13 1960), Leslie Nielsen plays a business man named Alan whose normal life becomes undone when a strange young woman stalks and charms her way into his life. Lily works in the same building as Alan, studies him, and later finds a way to have lunch with her seeming prey. She's played by Natalie Trundy, who went on to play various characters in all five Planet of the Apes films. Lily will do anything to be Alan's woman, and when she calls him at home, Alan's wife immediately accuses him of an affair. To make matters worse, long-time colleague Merle's own mental instability bubbles to the surface. A longtime admirer of Alan, Merle is jealous of his success, and begins to believe he is Alan. Lily ends up a red herring when she is murdered by Merle in an attempt to frame Alan, and Merle wants to either kill Alan and slide into his new role as husband and father to Alan's wife and daughter. None of Merle's actions make any sense, and "The Twisted Image" is peculiarly structured in that its narrative is shaped by the actions of two separately acting damaged people who have a sense of wanting to do "something", but everything Merle does is so ill conceived and illogical there's never any threat that he'll succeed or even damage Alan's good name. Where the episode does succeed is legitimizing Merle's danger as a force capable of disrupting anything. He's unpredictable and when he's in the forefront it's not clear what direction the story will take, or how many others he'll harm in his self-destructive pursuit. Mirrors are a visual motif in "The Twisted Image"; characters are frequently seen looking through them in the episode, which comes to a head in the finale. The shattered mirror disrupting Merle's warped perception of his own identity; looking into the mirror and not seeing yourself as another looking back, but the broken pieces of the man you really are.

In "Child's Play" (1.02, written by Robert Dozier, directed by Arthur Hiller, September 20 1960), Hank is a product of parental neglect. An 11 year old boy spending his summer at a family cabin with his mother and father, he quickly grows bored and sinks into his fantasies, playing by himself with intense imagination. In the in media res cold open he aims a gun at a man and threatens to shoot, a man he calls Black Bart. In the post credits scene afterward, which takes us to the start of the story, Hank is balancing on top of a log, afraid to fall off, believing himself to be hundreds of feet above ground. When he falls (which is really only a drop of one foot) he screams as if his life is in peril. His imagination is so strong the viewer is almost convinced what he's saying is real, and this might be a fantasy episode of TV. It's not, and Hank falls deeper in his fantasies while his parents talk about their broken marriage, separation, and how they've failed their son; the father through neglect, and the mother through passivity. The episode frequently cuts back and forth from the mom and dad's ongoing conversation in the cabin, and Hank's outside adventures. He's stolen one of his dad's hunting guns and shoots it at make-believe enemies. We're never shown what he thinks he's seeing, just a kid shooting at nothing. The location scouting is this episode's MVP; the woods, creek, and waterfall the child explores is an attractive rural surrounding, an ideal place for a child to roam free with one's imagination - should one avoid walking atop the waterfall, at least, which Hank does here. The Black Bart character the boy has been hunting, the parents realize, is a manifestation of Hank's growing contempt of his father (who's name is actually Bart, so that it takes long at all for the parents to connect the dots is a little absurd). "Child's Play" tries to comment on damaged child psyche as a result of a broken family life, and parental separation, but its ideas are a little more than the writing knows how to handle. It's interesting on both sides (the Hank narrative, and the parent narrative), but clumsy in how they intersect and dubious in its resolution. The episode never fully addresses the seriousness of Hank's problems, and its climax seems to avoid further important dialogue through a preposterous moment of catharsis.

In "Worse than Murder" (1.03, written by Mel Goldberg, directed by Mitchell Leisen, September 27, 1960), Boris Karloff sets up an intriguing story that ends up being a little more routine than how described. "We're concerned now with a woman who makes use of a nightmare to persecute the innocent as well as the guilty". Karloff brings up dreams and nightmares a couple time in his introduction, but unfortunately the episode never ventures into that territory. Thriller isn't yet a horror show. The extent of a man's dreams being relevant here is the old man who dies in the opening, and the contents of his diary. Connie Walworth (Constance Ford), already a widow, has now lost her uncle, who it seems did not have a will. With her ties to a wealthy family slipping, she's afraid of being left out of inheritance, all of which may be given to her mother-in-law, Myra. "Worse than Murder" is full of blackmail and back stabbing and controlling women playing a continuous game of one upping the other. It's uncommon for a television episode from this era to pivot so strongly around women and their own agency. They're not traditionally likable, but in a way that's refreshing to see. We often see thrillers centered around awful men trying to con one another, and "Worse than Murder" doesn't really hold its punches for its three women (the last being Myra's young daughter). The narrative gets shaken by several generic twists, including speculation that the old man's death brought on these series of events, may have been caused by murder. This episode is the first of two directed by Mitchel Leisen, who with a career trajectory opposite to Arthur Hiller, flourished as a Hollywood film director throughout the 1930s, 40s and 50s, and then pivoted to television for his final working decade. He made many Pre-Code and screwball comedies, the likes of which have starred Carole Lombard, Jean Arthur, Barbara Stanwyck, Marlene Dietrich, Claudette Colbert, Ginger Rogers and Joan Fontaine. He directed another legendary actress on TV, Ida Lupino in The Twilight Zone's "The Sixteen -Millimeter Shrine" (1959).

In "The Mark of the Hand" (1.04, written by Eric Peters, directed by Paul Henreid, October 4, 1960), we get our second installment of Children Shouldn't Play With Guns. A young girl, Tessa, has shot a man dead. In the aftermath she has decided to go mute (for ...reasons), while the adults in her life and a doctor try to uncover the truth in the household over the dead body and whether Tessa is a cold blooded killer. There was a woman witness to the death, and the second time the murder scene plays out in the episode, it is shown in a radically different fashion ala Rashomon, with the girl wearing an evil grin while she gives a villain speech and shoots the man. It's very over-the-top in how trite and unbelievable it is against everything else in the episode. There is a darker current in "The Mark of the Hand" where it's discovered the man was murdered by another adult in the house, who then frames the child, and tries to frame her for a second killing to get her locked away in an institution. If it sounds interesting in theory, the story itself is really not. The episode sleepwalks from start to finish. There are too many characters who aren't clearly defined, the writing of the girl is especially bad and rings emotionally and logically untrue, and its conclusions are obvious even early into the running time because its what-if plot lines might as well be tangible characters walking around in t-shirts with "Red Herring" printed on the front.

In "Rose's Last Summer" (1.05, written by Marie Baumer, directed by Arthur Hiller, October 11 1960), Boris gives an eerie introduction as he reminisces on a Hollywood legend of a bygone era, Rose French, who in the opening scene is nearly run over by a car after being thrown out of a bar. Hysterical, disheveled, she is far removed from her A list celebrity of 20 years prior. A doll's head appears behind Karloff, which is then superimposed with a skull. This is a fun opening, and even if at best it's inviting itself to be a riff on Sunset Boulevard and The Twilight Zone's "The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine", the resulting episode is far more banal. It stars Mary Astor in one of her final roles, and the episode fails to give her the material worthy of her talents (she does the only heavy lifting against a cast of cardboard cutouts). An actor since the silent era, she's probably best known for her 1940s success in movies such as The Maltese Falcon, The Palm Beach Story and Meet Me in St. Louis. The plot is a little too incomprehensible to try and explain, and there isn't any mood to the piece. This is fortunately Arthur Hiller's final Thriller. He's either not a good fit for the series, or he progressively put less effort into each one of his episodes. "Rose's Last Summer" feels barely directed and thrown together with the least semblance of care.

In "The Guilty Men" (1.06, written by John Vlahos, directed by Jules Bricken, October 18 1960), three poor boys meet up on a rooftop late on night; two are shocked that the other has stolen money that he wishes to use to pay for his recently deceased father's coffin. The grieving son wants his father to have the best coffin, but his brother and friend are challenged by the lengths to accomplish this. Each in poverty, but with their own moral code, they make a pact that night that they'll each become successful adults so money won't have to be a problem for them anymore. A montage of newspaper headlines lets us know just how much these boys - now men - have accomplished in the following decades. Charlie Roman is a syndicate mob boss, his brother Tony a doctor, and their friend Lou is Charlie's advisor. After years in organized crime, Charlie wants his business to go clean, which causes a rift in the syndicate, with threat of a civil war coming between the lot of them. This is far from the horror stories Thriller would specialize in, but it's a fairly well done hour-long mafia film. The most coherently plotted episode this far in, its pieces are always in motion, characters are well distinguished from one another, their motives defined, and are decently to strongly acted. It's visually a little more bare-bones that I would like, but has more prominent shadow use than the preceding episodes, so the series is finding its groove, little by little. It feels inert, as all episodes so far do, but this is a step in the right direction. The early episodes feel modeled after Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which is a half-hour series, and these six episodes would all make more palatable half-hours without losing any nuance.The next episode would blow the doors off of everything.

In "The Purple Room" (1.07, written and directed by Douglas Heyes, October 25 1960), Thriller inadvertently finds its true calling in this intended Halloween-special. Douglas Heyes, with a background in writing and directing across many television shows, including pulp detective and noir, and horror and science-fiction, had a really strong output in autumn 1960. He directed for The Twilight Zone in its first two seasons, and in the two weeks following Thriller's "The Purple Room", the former series aired two Heyes-directed masterpieces, "The Howling Man" and "Eye of the Beholder". "The Purple Room" isn't as spectacular as those episodes, but that it's more on the level of what The Twilight Zone was producing (not just genre similarly, but quality of filmmaking) versus Thriller's earlier Alfred Hitchcock Presents wannabees shows an enormous growth the series made in just one hour.

The establishing shot is of a familiar looking creepy house (which appears again later in the episode as characters talk as they walk up to it). It's the Bates house from Psycho (which premiered a few months before this episode aired) on the Universal Studios Lot. It must have been shocking to see this striking image on TV back in 1960 just months after seeing Psycho. It's also surprising that the house was reused for Thriller and not Hitchcock's own anthology series also on NBC/Universal, unless there is an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents which uses it as well. "The Purple Room" cuts to a girl in bed, frightened beyond belief, screaming and shooting a gun towards the screen. We're not shown what's scaring her, or what she's shooting at. This incident is explained much later in the episode, now re-contextualized as a ghost story; a tragic night which has caused this house to become haunted.

In a spooky intro, Karloff walks through the house at night, a candle in hand. As he calls on the episode's stars one by one, they appear to his right, and too are making their way through the dimly lit room, each one also holding a candle of their own. Their faces appear out of focus and then gradually click into focus just as they turn their heads and walk on through the back of the screen. Rear-projection is often utilized in these scenes; as Boris talks about the episode clips of the actors are very obviously being projected on a screen behind him. This is the first time they sync up the projected image with Boris' stage. They're made to appear as if all on the same screen, and when the out-of-focus actors are walking around the in-focus Karloff, it's a disorienting image. It's a noticeably manufactured effect, but it works enough to create a desired impression.

Rip Torn stars in "The Purple Room", as Duncan, a man who must spend one entire night in this large house on a valuable estate as per his late brother's will. After which, he must then maintain a residence for a period of one year. When this is accomplished, he may do with the house - and land - as he wishes. Duncan has no interest and in the house and wants to destroy it and sell the land for a huge profit. He has to oblige to the will, because if he doesn't, the house's ownership will fall to his two cousins. The two cousins do their best to spook Duncan out of the house, but the skeptic shoos their cautions and is left alone for the night. The episode's greatest lengthy sequence is when Duncan is alone throughout the night, talking to himself (and a possible intruder who could be his cousins), and growing increasingly annoyed and paranoid with every noise he hears - or thinks he hears. The rustling of curtains, blowing of wind, creaking of stairs, a framed photograph slanting, it's all horror cliches 101, and "The Purple Room" basks in these simple horror tropes with such an earnest enthusiasm. This is a haunted house story in the fashion of William Castle and House of Haunted Hill. It makes powerful use of framing shadows, and composing images that fall under classic horror iconography but are still uneasy in seeing unfold in real time. Less is more in "The Purple Room", and often the case for good horror in general. The black of night overwhelms and distorts what the eye can perceive. Implied terror is often greater than what can be physically constructed (especially in the case of a low budget television series). This episode is as simple as it is memorable, and after the humdrum six episode opening stretch, Thriller has been shocked by a lightning rod and sprung to life just like Karloff's famous creature three decades earlier.

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Recommended Episodes:
"The Purple Room"