Today, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark has a fearsome reputation as the scariest made-for-TV movie of all time. Which is pushing it a bit (it’s not a patch on Screen One: GhostWatch (1992)) but it’s still a very effective chiller that doesn’t quite live up to its hype but which is still rather fascinating. At … Continue reading
For a whole generation of horror fans, the curiously titled Frankenstein: The True Story (1973) was likely their first introduction to Mary Shelley’s famous creations. It was something of an event at the time, heavily hyped and clearly displaying the benefits of a sizeable budget. At a time when most made-for-TV productions, particularly the genre … Continue reading
A real oddity from the early 70s, still fondly remembered and much-loved, perhaps due in part to its Beatles connections. Based on a an album of the same name by Harry Nilsson (a long-time John Lennon associate), it’s an animated made-for-TV “fable” which bears more than a passing resemblance to the feature film Yellow Submarine … Continue reading
The BBC have long had a tradition of Christmas ghost stories on both television and radio, the most famous being the series of A Ghost Story For Christmas (1971-1978) and its more recent revivals. In 1972, the series presented A Warning to the Curious on Christmas Eve and gave fans of the supernatural on the … Continue reading
One of those increasingly hard-to-find pre-fame Steven Spielberg TV gigs, one which didn’t get the theatrical release afforded Duel (1971) so which is now consigned to relative obscurity. Back in the 1970s, as an impressionable young-ish child, this seemed to be the scariest thing ever – time hasn’t been particularly kind to it, but there’s … Continue reading
There’s an argument that one should never go back to fond TV memories, that for the most part they should stay just that, memories, and not be exhumed many years after the fact to be subjected to the scrutiny of an older and invariably more cynical sensibility. As at the time of writing (December 2006), … Continue reading
Back in the early 1970s, producer/director Dan Curtis was in the middle of a run of small screen horrors, carving himself a niche on American TV as a genre specialist. Supernatural soap Dark Shadows (1966-1971) had been a huge success and by the end of 1973 Curtis had adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson (Dr Jekyll … Continue reading
