Thriller Journal, Entry 2 (Episodes 8-14)

In "The Watcher" (1.08, written by Donald S. Sanford, directed by John Brahm, November 1, 1960), a man forces a screaming young woman under water as she fights for her life. They're in a boat, presumably far enough from land, as he holds her under water long enough until she fights no longer. She is dead. The man sits back, studies his bloodied hands, then washes them in the water. His hands remain the focal point of this image. And as the murder weapon, they're an important part of this story. A school teacher by day, he tries to suppress his horrific urges, but Boris Karloff warns us, it's only a matter of time before he strikes again.

The killer, Mr. Freitag (Martin Gabel) spends his off-time peering menacingly out of his bedroom window across the street, watching his neighbor, a very 1960 style of handsome young man Larry (Richard Chamberlain), and his girlfriend Beth (Olive Sturgess). Partially cloaked by the drapes of his window, Mr. Freitag's eyes pierce the young lovers, who appear to be his fixation. This immediately prompts him to type out a letter which he anonymously sends to the police station - "IS THERE ANOTHER CORRUPTER ABROAD? I MUST BE SURE BEFORE I KILL AGAIN.." His Zodiac-style letter has the police confused, as there hasn't been a murder charge in their white picket fence town in decades, until one cop remembers the mysterious death of Suzie out by the lake a year ago, which had been unconvincingly labeled an accident. Considering that Mr. Freitag is seen strangling Suzie in the opening before he drowns her, shoddy detective work must've been involved to mistaken it for anything but murder. Regardless, Suzie's case is reopened, as one cop questions around.

"The Watcher" is a strange and not particularly well-liked episode of Thriller. Had I prioritized only the fan-favourites going into this series I would have passed over this one, and I'm glad that didn't happen. "The Watcher" is hammy and full of holes with some extremely convenient plotting that have labeled many to label it camp. It's not camp, though. It's sincere. Serial killer horror stories were not nearly as common place in 1960 as they are today. This was the year of Psycho, and it shows a decent understanding of serial killer tropes before they became common knowledge. Freitag returns to the scene of his crimes, he inserts himself into the lives of the people he's targeting and the family of his victim, he has misplaced notions of superiority and a deep want to cleanse the Earth (he also quotes Paradise Lost regularly, which should be a red flag for anyone). While the episode never explicity tells us Freitag's motive, it seems likely to be tied to closeted homosexual feelings towards Larry. Suzie was his previous girlfriend, and now he's targeting his next one, as if to remove any love interests from his life out of jealousy. He even has a one-on-one scene with Larry in the first act that establishes that two men know each other, and Freitag seems to be trying to push life advice onto Larry, who isn't receptive to the older man's personal prying.

"The Watcher" is a quietly unsettling hour with dense tension once Freitag begins his pursuit of Larry and Beth. Freitag is often framed within shadows and around objects, his body and face hidden from plain sight, obscured even more by the pitch black night. Every night-set scene in "The Watcher" is filled with a growing dread, and the composition often gets so dark it's not entirely clear what just happened until a following scene. Scenes abruptly cut off at precise moments, fear mixed with uncertainty; smart editing prolonging the horror of the night. This is a violent episode, by old TV standards, and honestly, even today its blunt force and splashes of black blood are jarring to watch. Violence is never pretty in Thriller; it's not stylized. It's framed consistently as a horrible moment of ugliness. Its action is brief, with lasting consequences. "The Watcher"'s final disturbing moments feature a scream; even as the story ends, for the lives permanently scarred from this trauma, horror doesn't end.

In "Girl with a Secret" (1.09, written by Charles Beaumont, directed by Mitchell Leisen, November 15 1960), a newlywed's life is upended through an escalating series of twists. This is a shockingly terrible script from one of the greatest horror writers of the 20th century, Charles Beaumont (check out The Twilight Zone for many great stories he's penned; not even his weakest Zones come close to how misguided and directionless "Girl with a Secret" is). Alice and her husband Anthony have just gotten off a plane as she's about to meet her husband's family for the first time. When at the airport, though, his briefcase gets swapped by a stranger who runs off with his. She lets Anthony and they half-heartedly run after the stranger. Anthony doesn't seem to care much, and in an inevitable reveal, Anthony tells Alice that he is a spy for the government and in the middle of a dangerous mission that she must keep secret. They get chased by goons on and off who are so over-the-top in their characterizations they pass off comically bad and become embarrassing to watch. The most jarring villain has a forced smile fixed semi-permanently on his face. It's an attempt at emulating Conrad Veidt in the 1928 silent film The Man Who Laughs, but he looks more like one of the Gotham City citizens who got infected by Joker's laugh toxin gas in the Batman: The Animated Series episode "The Last Laugh". And whenever this buffoon isn't smiling or laughing, he's strutting across the screen like Jared Leto (in ...anything). It's one of those bad performances that's so astronomically misguided it's hard to believe the director thought it was acceptable. Everyone else is pretty dull, meanwhile, including a young Cloris Leachman, who I've never seen look this bored before. The story has a couple twists that fail to excite because there's never a sense of rising action in this piece. Everyone is scheming, with supposedly secret pacts with every pairing of characters, and hints at bigger twists, but outside of our smiling man, nobody seems to care. But it's hard to blame them with a script that fails them so hard. Everyone is unhappy and plotting and mysterious and we never get a feel of what anybody is like. Literally any character could make a face or heel turn at any point in this episode and it wouldn't elicit a reaction because we're never sure who anybody is. This is the only crime/thriller story I've seen or read from Beaumont, and he's ill equipped in the genre. "Girl with a Secret" shows a writer who is inspired by Hitchcock to try and make his own - smaller, budgeted version of - North by Northwest or Notorious, but who has no grasp on the conventions of the genre.

In "The Prediction (1.10, written by Donald S. Sanford, directed by John Brahm, November 22 1960), Boris Karloff himself steps into one of his stories as Mace the Mentalist, a phony clairvoyant who puts on cheesy shows for audiences. He's a dedicated performer and has been drawing crowds for many years. For Clayton Mace, it's a living. One night, an audience member asks him who will win tonight's big boxing match. Mace stares into his crystal ball, as he always does, but on this night something happens. Something that isn't just a part of his show. The camera cuts to a close-up on Mace, as the lens softens and he blurs out of focus, a look of shock consuming his face. Mace stammers on about how one of the boxers is going to die in that fight, and runs off stage so he can try and prevent it. People backstage stop him from causing a scene that tell him to lie down, but Clayton later discovers the boxer did in-fact die. A wave of mystery - and for some, suspicion - hovers over Mace the Mentalist, and the dead boxer's manager even tries to kill Mace out of revenge for believing him to be behind his client's death. For Clayton, this isn't just a freak incident. He experiences more visions from the future, each one foretelling a death. Each death follows as predicted. If this were a Twilight Zone more emphasis would have been placed on Clayton being the recipient of cosmic justice; after a life-time of fraud and building a career based on lies, now at near-death's-door himself, he is continually tormented and haunted by images of death. That's still very much there in "The Prediction", even if Thriller plays it a little more vague and never truly addresses the "why" and "how" of the story. It's taken a little for granted, and I wish the episode could have dwelled deeper, but Karloff performs his character with all the necessary baggage of haunted regret. His character gets beaten down significantly and across the hour is transformed from a jovial elder with a spring in his step into a weathered specter graciously walking into his own death. "The Prediction" is a little two-dimensional, but its supernatural horror is a welcome addition to the series and John Brahm directs the hell out of it, like he does with pretty much everything. It's a one-man show, and Boris Karloff kills it.

In "The Fatal Impulse" (1.11, written by Phillip MacDonald, directed by Gerald Mayer, November 29, 1960), great character actor Elisha Cook Jr. plays an unstable man who phones in an assassination attempt on the local mayor. The police are taking the matter seriously even if the mayor is not, and Cook's character slips into the mayor's office while he's out to plant a bomb. A secretary walks in, and he runs away, with bomb in hand. On an elevator crowded with women, he sneaks the bomb into a purse. While escaping the building he has a heart attack and as he's dying he informs the cops where the bomb is, but not which woman he put it on. This creates a mad dash race of various cops trying to track down all the women in that elevator from that moment, and inspecting their purses. This is briskly paced and easy to watch, but never rises above base level competence. It's only really noteworthy for two appearances from a young Mary Tyler Moore (who in her only scene of dialogue exudes more wit than every other character).

In "The Big Blackout" (1.12, written by Oscar Millard, directed by Maurice Geraghty, December 6 1960), Jack Carson plays recovering alcoholic Burt Lewis in an episode that treats alcoholism which as much grace and subtlety as throwing a chandelier down a flight of stairs. Burt becomes the target of thugs and an assassination attempt through a case of mistaken identity, or perhaps Burt really is the Bil Logan he apparently looks like. Burt's alcoholic stupor was so bad for years he doesn't remember a chunk of his past, and begins to believe maybe he murdered a person during a drunken blackout. He runs around trying to clear his name, even with help of local police, even though he's a suspect. Meanwhile his wife keeps liquor in the house to entertain guests, who casually drink in front of Burt, in his own house. Burt Lewis lives in a topsy-turvy world. I'm not sure this episode understands alcoholism (present or post), or police, or murder investigations. It's another nonsensically scripted Thriller that might as well have been a live stage performance. There's no film direction or cinematography to speak of. People speak in rooms and the camera is right there to statically capture all of them at once, and occasionally throw in a close-up when it wants us to get a good look at a moment of Acting. Jack Carson's a good actor with a strong resume but he seems lost and disinterested here.

In "Knock Three-One-Two" (1.13, written by John Kneubuhl, directed by Herman Hoffman, December 13 1960), Ray Kenton is a man in severe gambling debt and will be killed by gangsters if we he can't pay them off within 24 hours. His wife has money, but is tired of saving his neck so refuses to help him this time. Ray conspires with a serial murderer on the loose, named the Silk Stalking Strangler by the press, to plot the murder of his death so he can take her money. This is a nice-ish looking episode with heavy shadows and noir appeal, but it leaves a lit to be desired. Bare bones plotting and mostly adequate performances, only a young Warren Oates does anything interesting, in a supporting role as a mentally ill man who believes himself to the Strangler and tries again and again to turn himself in to the police. It's a shame the only interesting part of this episode is at the very margins, the rest is quickly forgettable.

In "Man in the Middle" (1.14, Howard Rodman, directed by Fletcher Markle, December 20 1960), stand-up comedian Mort Sahl awkwardly shrugs his way through thugs, shootouts and a kidnapping scheme. I've never seen his stand-up but he's apparently very influential in that medium. In Thriller, he's a terrible actor. Mort plays a writer who overhears two people in a restaurant booth next to his plot a kidnapping of a rich business man's daughter. They realize he's overheard them, and decide to beat him up and get him to shut his mouth. Because as movies tell us, that always works. He goes to the business man's house to explain everything, is immediately kicked out for being crazy, somehow accidentally "saves" the daughter from being kidnapped by kidnapping her before the kidnappers get to her, which builds up to a bizarre ransom situation and the worst shoot-out in moving pictures history. Nothing makes sense, none of it is remotely enjoyable, and I'll be happier once I forget having seen this.

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Recommended Episodes:
"The Watcher"
"The Prediction"

Thriller Episodes 1-7