We begin tonight with Rox of Spazhouse sending over a television episode…
The 1950s ushered in many hour length programs that filled the television air waves. Experiments in short format stories with very young actors pushed the limits in storytelling in a new age. One such show was Suspicion, a show that only ran for one year: 1957-58. Importantly, this show was under executive producer and directing giant Alfred Hitchcock. Over the course of that year, under Hitchcock, forty-two episodes were produced. The first episode was directed by Hitch himself. And to think people are amazed when the likes of Martin Scorsese and David Lynch take the helm at the small screen format. We owe a lot to television storytelling by Hitchcock, and later, Serling.
“The Voice in the Night,” written in 1907 by William Hope Hodgson, was deemed by many horror writers afterwards as the greatest horror story ever. Many writers who came after Hodgson site his work as a major influence upon their own. My favorite is his character Carnacki the Ghost Finder; I would argue he was a precursor to Darren McGavin’s Night Stalker. Hodgson enjoyed a very prolific career in writing in the early twentieth century, though it was cut short by World War I.
A mentioned earlier, many known faces practiced their craft on the small screen before moving on. This episode stars James Coburn and Patrick Macnee. Additional information on Hodgson can be found here at Wikipedia. And if you’re curious to read his work, you will find a number of eBooks available.
And candy corn is still available at the end cap.
Danke, Rox. Find more of her stuff here. And now…”The Voice in the Night.”
Tonight’s feature film…well, Day 13 is generally reserved for sci-fi madness. And there’s really not much that can be said about the following film that the title doesn’t handle. It’s 1968’s Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women. All I can say is you owe it to yourself to watch the first three minutes. It’s quite possibly the best “this could all be true!” prologues we’ll post this year. Well, I can also say this: Peter Bogdanovich (Noises Off) did the narration and also directed. One of which he did this under a pseudonym. You decide which.
