The Twilight Zone – Blood and Porridge

October 19, 2023October 24, 2023

A Russell-ing in the dark

© Penguin Classics

Another post for Halloween…

Even if the American horror, science-fiction and mystery writer Ray Russell hadn’t done any writing, it’s likely he still would have had an impact on one of his preferred genres.

In the 1950s, after serving in the wartime US Air Force, studying at the Chicago Conservatory of Music and working for the United States Treasury, he became fiction editor for Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine. Playboy was an odd combination of smutty pictures of hot ladies and seriously well-written stories and articles. The magazine’s detractors have dismissed this as a cynical ploy on Hefner’s part, propagating the idea that you could simultaneously be an unsavoury male lech and a connoisseur of the literary and intellectual. Hence, by perusing the latest fiction by Philip Roth or an interview with Jean-Paul Sartre, its readers didn’t have to feel bad about jerking off to a picture of the Playmate of the Month a few pages earlier.

Whatever. During the 1950s, Russell must have kept many horror and fantasy writers, such as Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury and Charles Beaumont, afloat by regularly buying their short works and printing them in Playboy‘s glossy – if sometimes ejaculation-splattered – pages. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, those guys had moved onto television and were writing scripts for shows like The Twilight Zone (1959-64) and the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller (1960-62). (In Robert Bloch’s case, his 1959 novel Psycho also became something of a hit when it was adapted for the cinema screen by a chap called Alfred Hitchcock). These shows imprinted themselves on the DNA of the kids watching them, who occasionally grew up to be popular filmmakers, like Steven Spielberg, or popular novelists, like Stephen King.

In effect, indirectly, Russell helped cultivate an unsettling, mid-20^th-century American gothic. This was one in which the world suddenly and inexplicably turned dark and weird for the citizens of post-war, suburban America – for office-bound men in grey-flannel suits, dutiful housewives in nipped-in-at-the-waist housedresses, wholesome kids playing behind white picket fences. And it’s one whose influence is still felt today.

But it’s Ray Russell the writer, rather than the editor, whom I want to discuss here. I’ve just read a collection of his short stories, first published in 1985 and now reprinted as a ‘Penguin Classic’, entitled Haunted Castles. Yes, I bet nobody working for Penguin Books back in 1985 imagined their prestigious publishing company would one day consider a book called Haunted Castles a ‘classic’. Its seven stories show Russell’s love for a different type of gothic fiction – the full-blooded, 19^th-century variety exemplified by such books as Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1821), Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly (1872) and, of course, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).

Russell’s tales here take place in a world of wild, sparsely-populated mountains and forests, fearsome thunder-and-lightning storms, nightmarish coach-rides and remote settlements inhabited by superstitious villagers. And, as the collection’s title suggests, castles. Each one is a “vast edifice of stone” exuding “an austerity, cold and repellent, a hint of ancient mysteries long buried, an effluvium of medieval dankness and decay.” In fact, four of these stories feature castles and they’re all equipped with torture chambers: “There stood the infernal rack, and branding irons and thumbscrews, and that grim table called in French peine forte et dure, whereon helpless wretches were constrain’d to lie under intolerable iron weights until the breath of life was press’d from them.”

Occupying the first two-thirds of the book are three novellas that are frequently regarded as a trilogy, though they don’t have anything in common apart from their gothic settings and trimmings and the fact that they have single-word, polysyllabic titles beginning with ‘s’: Sardonicus, Sagittarius and Sanguinarius.

© Columbia Pictures

Kicking off the proceedings is Sardonicus, Russell’s best-remembered story. It’s told in the first-person by a 19^th-century London physician called Sir Robert Cargrave, who specialises in treating muscular disorders. The title character summons him to – surprise! – his castle in ‘a remote and mountainous region of Bohemia’. Sardonicus suffered a nasty mishap in his youth. Following his father’s funeral, he discovered that prior to his death the old man had purchased a winning lottery ticket. Inconveniently, the ticket was pocketed in his burial clothes. The avaricious Sardonicus dug up his father to retrieve it, and claim the attendant fortune, but paid a hideous price. Seeing a terrifying death’s-head grin on his parent’s decaying face, he was so traumatised that his facial muscles froze and fixed his mouth in an identical, grotesque rictus. Now resembling a 19^th-century version of the Joker in Batman, he tasks Cargrave with finding a cure for his affliction.

Channelling Dracula with its setting and Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera (1909) with its disfigured central character, Sardonicus benefits from both an irresistible set-up and Russell’s knowingly-florid prose-style. Also, he manages to sustain the reader’s sympathy for Sardonicus despite it becoming clear early on that he’s an evil shit who probably got what he deserved. Sardonicus’s unfortunate wife is someone Cargrave once loved from afar, and the smiley-faced cad soon makes clear to the physician that unspeakable things will be done to her if he fails in his mission.

Meanwhile, Sagittarius and Sanginarius channel other macabre literary and historical characters. With Sagittarius, it’s the dual personage described in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), though the setting isn’t Victorian London but decadent fin-de-siecle Paris – well, Paris in 1909, to be exact. Russell has a lot of fun evoking the city’s simultaneously sophisticated and sleazy theatrical world at the time, though when the Jekyll-and-Hyde trope surfaces, it’s not difficult to guess how the story will end.

Sanguinarius focuses on Elizabeth Bathory, the notorious 16^th / 17^th-century Hungarian countess who allegedly bathed in the blood of hundreds of murdered girls and women, believing it was a beauty treatment that’d hold the ravages of old age at bay. Interestingly, Russell’s take on the legend depicts Bathory as, initially at least, an innocent victim. The goodness gets gradually squeezed out of her, and she becomes corrupted, by an evil entourage around her. Russell also downplays the idea that she bathed in blood to stay young. Rather, the slaughter is mostly fuelled by sheer badness, by the thrill of being ‘steep’d… in reeking devilish rites, and vilest pleasures… sharing both dark lust and blame.”

Of the other stories, Comet Wine is the most substantial. Set in a community of composers and musicians in 19^th-century St Petersburg, this one draws on the Faust legend and reflects the love Russell – a student at the Chicago Conservatory of Music – had for classical music. The remaining three pieces, The Runaway Lovers, The Vendetta and The Cage, are comparatively brief affairs and are best described as gothic fairy stories. But each comes with a nasty barb in its tail.

Reading these stories, there’s a sense of Russell having his cake and eating it. He describes horrible, bloody, perverted goings-on in stylised prose and with obvious relish, but at the same time doesn’t go into detail and rub our noses in the gore. Elizabeth Bathory merely laments, for example, about “the manner by which these hapless prisoners were put to death: not with the swift, blunt mercy that is dealt even to dumb cattle, but by prolong’d and calculated tortures, which I have not stomach to set down here, so degraded and inhuman were they.” A fine line is trod between the erudite and the sordid – a line that, come to think of it, Hugh Hefner would have approved of.

© Santa Clara Productions / American International Pictures

Incidentally, Russell also wrote for the movies but, sadly, no one properly managed to capture his flamboyant gothic visions onscreen. He scripted a film version of Sardonicus in 1961, with the title slightly adjusted to Mr Sardonicus. The film terrified me when I saw it on late-night TV at the age of ten. However, as it was directed by William Castle, a filmmaker more fondly remembered for the outrageous gimmicks with which he publicised his movies – plastic skeletons flying above cinema audiences’ heads in The House on Haunted Hill (1959), special ‘Illusion-o’ viewing glasses to allow audiences to see the ghosts of the title in 13 Ghosts (1960), a 45-second ‘fright-break’ near the end of Homicidal (1961) so that cinema-goers who couldn’t handle the horror could flee the auditorium (and get a refund on the way out) – rather than for the quality of the movies themselves, I imagine it wouldn’t stand up well today.

Around the same time, Russell penned scripts for two directors who’d recently made their names pioneering a newer, bolder, more vivid form of gothic-horror cinema – Terence Fisher, who’d helmed Hammer Films’ revivals of Dracula and Frankenstein, and Roger Corman, who’d launched a series of adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories for American International Pictures. The results, alas, represented neither director at their best. Russell wrote The Horror of It All (1964) for Fisher while he was moonlighting from Hammer and working for the low-budget Lippert Films. A horror-comedy about an oddball family getting murdered one-by-one in a dilapidated mansion, it was evidently designed to cash in on a remake, released the year before, of the 1932 classic The Old Dark House. (Confusingly, 1963’s Old Dark House remake had been produced by Hammer and directed by William Castle.) Again, I found The Horror of It All scary enough, and funny enough, when I saw it as a ten-year-old, but I hate to think what it would seem like now, 48 years on.

Russell scripted an Edgar Allan Poe adaptation for Roger Corman, 1962’s The Premature Burial. It has its moments but lacks the flair of Corman’s best Poe movies like The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) or Masque of the Red Death (1964). This is partly due to it not having the energising presence of Corman’s usual Poe-movie star, Vincent Price. And it’s hamstrung by a lame ending.

I prefer a non-gothic film Russell wrote for Corman, the sci-fi chiller X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963). This is about a scientist, played by Ray Milland, who experiments on his own eyes and ends up seeing beyond the visual spectrum that’s perceptible to humans. Nothing good comes of this, of course. Milland’s increasingly penetrative vision goes from letting him see though clothing – hence a party scene where, to his bemusement, the dancing revellers appear to be cavorting in the nude – to letting him see the distant edges of the universe, where horrible things lurk. How one reacts to the film today depends on how one reacts to the special effects that Corman, a famously thrifty filmmaker, deploys to represent Milland’s visions. They vary from psychedelic patterns and filters to (when he’s peering into human bodies) flashes of what are obviously photos and diagrams taken from human-anatomy manuals. The effects are either desperately ingenious or just plain desperate, depending on your attitude. Still, the film cultivates an effective mood of cosmic horror and the ending is nightmarish in its logic.

Ray Russell died in 1999, before there’d been a truly impressive cinematic version of his work. Actually, there still hasn’t. But returning to Haunted Castles… I notice that the forward to my edition of it has been written by none other than the Oscar-winning Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro, who specialises in making horror and fantasy films.

So… How about it Guillermo?

From penguinrandomhouse.com / © Charles Martin Bush

October 16, 2021

The tragic, magic man

© Coronet Books

Continuing with the October / Halloween theme, here is a piece I first posted at the beginning of 2020 about a collection of spooky stories by the late, great Charles Beaumont.

Last year, while I was back visiting my family in Scotland, I happened to be hoking around in some boxes of books that belonged to me but that’d ended up gathering dust in a corner of my father’s attic. Inside one of those boxes I discovered a very old paperback called The Magic Man, a collection of mostly fantasy, horror and science-fiction stories by the late American writer Charles Beaumont originally published in 1965. Dimly, I recalled buying this for 25p, though the cover-price was a pre-decimalization 3/6, in a second-hand bookshop in the Lincolnshire town of Louth. I worked in Louth for five months in 1983 as a volunteer classroom assistant and houseparent at a residential school for boys with severe behavioral issues – ‘maladjusted’ boys, as they were called in those unsympathetic and non-PC days.

I knew Beaumont’s name in 1983 because I’d seen it attached to several movies that’d had a big impact on me while I was growing up, such as The Seven Faces of Dr Lao and Masque of the Red Death (1964). But after buying the book, I never got around to opening it and it ended up stashed away and unread among the hundreds, eventually thousands of other books I owned.

Anyway, 37 years later – this sentence makes me feel absolutely ancient – I’ve finally read the stories in The Magic Man. The collection kicks off with an introduction by Beaumont’s friend and mentor Ray Bradbury, which while gracious in tone suggests that Bradbury was a hard taskmaster to have as your writing tutor. He recalls telling the young Beaumont to write and submit one story every week: “He worked, I remember, part time at United Parcel Service, back in the early fifties, so as to spend the rest of his hours finishing that special story that must be sent off in the mail every Saturday.” Intriguingly, Bradbury also mentions that Beaumont tried, “for years, to convince movie producers to make films out of the Ian Fleming books.” Obviously, and sadly for Beaumont’s bank balance, someone else managed to convince Cubby Broccoli and Albert Saltzman to make films out of them first.

With Bradbury as his guru, it’s no surprise that several stories in The Magic Man bear the imprint of Bradbury’s own fanciful, atmospheric and wistfully nostalgic writing. The title story, about a stage magician who travels a circuit of small American prairie towns doing magic shows and who doesn’t appreciate the importance that his ‘magic’ holds for the prairie townspeople while they go about their otherwise humdrum existences, has echoes of Bradbury’s 1962 novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. It also evokes Charles G. Finney’s novel The Circus of Dr Lao, which coincidentally Beaumont adapted for producer George Pal as the movie The Seven Faces of Dr Lao. Also with a flavour of Bradbury-esque small-town America is The Hunger, although Beaumont’s tale of a lonely, frustrated spinster who feels a strange affinity for an escaped, murderous lunatic pushes the envelope further than the genteel Bradbury would have done.

Bradbury’s introduction notes too that Beaumont had a penchant for driving and “burning up the dirt on the nearest racetrack” and a couple of the stories reflect his love for automobiles. A Classic Affair, about a worried woman asking a friend to follow her husband, whom she believes is in an adulterous relationship, takes a nice twist when the man discovers just what, as opposed to who, the husband is having an affair with, although the twist that follows on from that twist isn’t perhaps so surprising. Meanwhile, the final story, A Death in the Country, convincingly details the desperate life of an aging and failing dirt-track car racer and is one of the collection’s few non-genre stories.

If Perchance to Dream, the story of a man with a heart condition who’s troubled by a recurrent dream where he’s lured onto a literally heart-stopping rollercoaster, sounds familiar, it’s because Beaumont adapted it into an episode of the classic TV show The Twilight Zone (1959-64). This was one of 22 episodes of that series that he scripted or co-scripted. (Beaumont clearly had conflicted feelings about writing for cinema and television. According to the cult New Wave sci-fi / fantasy author Harlan Ellison, Beaumont once told him that: “Attaining success in Hollywood is like climbing a gigantic mountain of cow flop, in order to pick one perfect rose from the summit. And you find when you’ve made that hideous climb… you’ve lost the sense of smell.”)

Another story that ended up as the basis for a TV episode is The New People, which became an instalment in the British anthology series Journey to the Unknown (1968-69), made by horror specialists Hammer Films in conjunction with 20^th Century Fox. Beaumont’s story features an enclave of successful professionals and their families living in a well-to-do American neighbourhood who, like the characters in Richard Yates’ novel Revolution Road (1961), are beneath the surface bored out of their wits with their situation. But while Yates’ characters try to solve the problem of their ennui by contemplating a move to Paris, Beaumont’s characters decide to enliven things by participating in some dark activities indeed. In the Journey to the Unknown episode, this sinister community is moved to the affluent Home Counties of England. With a first-rate cast including Robert Reed, Adrienne Corri, Melissa Stribling, Milo O’Shea and a splendidly saturnine Patrick Allen, it’s fairly effective. But the episode leaves out an important plot element involving the main characters’ sex lives (or lack of them) that gives the original story a satisfying and, with hindsight, logical twist ending.

The Magic Man has a couple of weaker entries, which tend to be science fictional. The Last Caper suffers because it attempts to graft a Raymond Chandler / Philip Marlowe-type private-detective story onto a space-age setting, with characters speaking a futuristic version of Chandler’s famously hardboiled 1940s patois. (“Don’t push it, rocket-jockey…”). This sounds awfully dated now. Similarly, The Monster Show has its characters speaking like futuristic beatniks and doesn’t fare any better. (“It’s pictures that count. Flap?” “Nothing can go wrong. Nothing-o.”) It makes me wonder how dated the hip and cutting-edge, for the time, ‘cyberpunk’ sci-fi novels of the 1980s and 1990s will seem in a few decades’ time, if they don’t seem dated already.

That said, The Crooked Man, set in a future where homosexuality is the norm and heterosexuals are a persecuted minority, is a fine example of a science-fiction story that highlights a contemporary injustice by pitching its readers into a world where the tables have been turned. It was pretty bold of Playboy magazine to publish the story when it did, back in 1955.

A little too varied in quality, and with some stories that show their influences a little too much – the 1955 story The Murderers, though enjoyable, pinches the premise of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) and the 1929 play by John Hamilton on which it was based – The Magic Man isn’t wholly satisfying. But it contains a lot of interesting and entertaining fiction and makes one wonder what spectacular things Beaumont might have gone on to write if he hadn’t died at the wastefully young age of 38. Yes, Charles Beaumont was born, grew up, established himself as a writer and died in almost the same period of time that elapsed between my buying The Magic Man and my reading it.

The nature of his passing wasn’t pleasant. He succumbed to a mystery illness, which his agent Forest J. Ackerman theorized was a combination of Alzheimer’s and Pick’s disease, whereby he suffered from headaches, reduced concentration, slurred speech, erratic behavior, weight loss and premature aging. At the time of his death, one of Beaumont’s sons recalled, he “looked 95 and was, in fact, 95 by every calendar except the one on your watch.”

So, while the main character of the title story here styles himself as the Magic Man, I can’t help but think of the story’s author as the Tragic Man.

From twilightzone.fandom.com/wiki

August 13, 2021August 19, 2021

Richard Matheson – he was legend

© Orion Publishing Co

Something has got me thinking about Richard Matheson, the science-fiction and horror author and screenwriter who passed away in 2013 at the age of 87.

What thing? Well, the news that the anti-Covid-19-vaxxers in America, determined to plumb the depths of stupidity to find new reasons for not getting vaccinated, have found the stupidest reason yet. Speculation is rife that the vaccine could turn you in a zombie. You know, like one did in the 2007 sci-fi / horror movie I am Legend, with Will Smith, which was based on Matheson’s 1954 novel of the same name. This has prompted one of the movie’s scriptwriters, Akiva Goldsman, to step up and announce on social media: “Oh. My. God. It’s a movie. I made that up. It’s not real.” In fact, the source of the contagion in the movie wasn’t a vaccine but a virus, genetically reprogrammed by Dr Emma Thompson to combat cancer, going spectacularly rogue.

In Matheson’s novel I am Legend the monsters are vampires, not zombies. Also, what turns people into those vampires isn’t the movie’s lab-reprogrammed virus, but a mysterious pandemic. However, the book’s premise of the world being suddenly and nightmarishly turned upside down and a small number of uninfected humans finding themselves menaced by those who’ve been infected and turned into monsters, including their own loved ones, was one that a young George Romero appropriated for his seminal 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead. In doing so, Romero made it the blueprint for at least 80% of the zombie movies that have lurched across cinema and TV screens ever since.

In the novel, the number of uninfected humans is small indeed: just one, Richard Neville, who is alone in the world during the daytime and then under siege in his fortified house at night, by the vampires that everyone else has turned into. Gradually, Neville, researching the plague, stumbles on scientific explanations for the vampire-like symptoms of its victims, why they drink blood, why they can only be killed by stakes through the heart, and why they have an aversion to sunlight, garlic and crucifixes. I am Legend also ends with an unnerving psychological twist. Neville, who’s spent his days roaming the surrounding city and staking the slumbering vampires, realises that the vampires are now the normal ones and he’s become the monster of everyone’s nightmares, the deadly legend of the title.

It’s a pity that though I am Legend was filmed on several occasions, and though Matheson lived to a venerable age, he never got to see a satisfactory celluloid version of it. The novel received its first film treatment in Italy, where Rome unconvincingly stood in for Los Angeles, with the cheaply and incompetently made L’Ultimo Uomo della Terra (The Last Man on Earth). Neville was played by Vincent Price, whom Matheson admired as an actor but thought was miscast in the role. L’Ultimo Uomo della Terra was at least fairly faithful to the book, unlike the subsequent film versions, 1970’s The Omega Man, with Charlton Heston, and the 2007 one. In The Omega Man the vampires have become a group of demented albino mutants called, with an unsubtle reference to Charles Manson, the Family. In the Will Smith version of I am Legend they’re even less impressive, a bunch of bald, hyperactive zombies animated by some shoddy CGI.

Both the later movie versions lack the courage to portray Neville as being totally alone and eventually have him encounter other, as yet uninfected survivors. They also lack the courage to include Matheson’s game-changing ending. Instead, they close with Heston and Smith depicted as Christ-like figures who nobly sacrifice themselves for the good of what’s left of humanity. Neville was a more interesting character when he discovered he’d become a bogeyman. Still, disappointing though all three film versions are, there’s at least a good graphic-novel adaptation of I am Legend available.

The more I reminisce about Matheson, the more I realise what a wonderful and influential writer he was. His other big – though ‘big’ perhaps isn’t the most appropriate adjective – novel of the 1950s was The Shrinking Man (1956). Its hero, an archetypal middle-class American male called Scott Carey, is exposed to a radioactive cloud that causes his body to shrink at the rate of a seventh of an inch every day. Thereafter, Carey’s world turns nightmarishly upside down too, though at a more gradual rate than Richard Neville’s. First, he experiences psychological and sexual humiliation as he finds himself increasingly dwarfed by his normal-sized wife. Following an assault by the family cat, no longer a loveable moggie but a carnivorous monster, the now-tiny Carey loses all contact with humanity and finds himself trapped in his house’s basement where the dangers facing him become formidable indeed. A common spider, for instance, takes on elephantine proportions. And Carey’s shrinking doesn’t stop, let alone get reversed. At the book’s close, he muses, “If nature existed on endless planes, so also might intelligence.” Thereafter, he dwindles away into infinity.

A year after its publication, the novel was filmed as The Incredible Shrinking Man, directed by Jack Arnold and with Matheson providing the script. Matheson was unhappy with how Arnold structured the film. He told the story in linear fashion, whereas Matheson wanted it to begin with the shrunken Carey in the basement, reliving what had happened to him via a series of flashbacks. However, it’s still one of the best science fiction movies of the 1950s. It crucially retains the novel’s bleakly philosophical ending. I can remember seeing the film on TV as a kid and being genuinely upset when the ending defied my expectations that things would finish on an upbeat note. The Incredible Shrinking Man was, incidentally, one of the great J.G. Ballard’s top ten favourite sci-fi movies.

As well as novels, Matheson was a prolific writer of short stories, many of which were collected in four books called the Shock series. Shock 1-4 were published in Britain in the 1970s by Sphere Books, who decorated the covers with lurid and gory images – the antithesis of the unsensational, non-violent and thoughtful works inside. The stories I remember best include Long Distance Call, about a woman plagued by mysterious phone calls that, she discovers, emanate from a local cemetery into which the telephone wire has blown down; The Children of Noah, about a motorist who finds himself in Kafkaesque predicament when he breaks the 15-miles-per-hour speed limit of a tiny American town called Zachary; and the brilliant The Splendid Source, in which a man embarks on a quest to find out where dirty jokes really come from.

Long Distance Call was one of several Matheson stories that were turned into episodes of the celebrated TV anthology series The Twilight Zone (1959-64). The best of these, adapted by Matheson himself, was of course Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. In this, William Shatner essayed his second-most-famous role, that of a just-released psychiatric patient who’s on board a plane and, looking out of the window, sees a gremlin dismantling one of the engines on the wing. Whenever he tries to alert the crew and fellow passengers, the beastie inconveniently disappears from view. Particularly memorable is the moment when the traumatised Shatner dares to peek through the window again and discovers the gremlin pressing its face, which resembles that of a hare-lipped teddy bear, against the outside of the glass and staring in at him. The episode was remade as a segment of the movie version of The Twilight Zone in 1983, with John Lithgow in the Shatner role, and ten years later it received the ultimate accolade – it was spoofed in a Treehouse of Horror edition of The Simpsons, with Bart Simpson the only passenger on the school bus able to see a gremlin sabotaging its engine. This version was called Nightmare at 5½ Feet.

Other episodes that Matheson penned for The Twilight Zone were also influential. A World of Difference is about a businessman who makes the mind-blowing discovery that he’s a fictional character and his life is actually a movie. Furthermore, the movie has just had its production halted, meaning he’ll have to live in the ‘real’ world as the declining, drunken movie star who’s been playing him. This clearly informs Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show. Meanwhile, Little Girl Lost tells the tale of a child who, one night, falls from her bed and into another dimension, a mysterious, misty void from which she can hear her parents’ concerned voices but can’t escape. A young Steven Spielberg no doubt saw and remembered this one, because the same idea features in 1982’s Spielberg-produced Poltergeist, though this time the little girl is sucked into the other dimension through the household TV set. And yes, The Simpsons spoofed it too in Treehouse of Horror.

Steven Spielberg has much to thank Matheson for. Matheson’s short story Duel, based on an experience he had on November 22^nd, 1963 – of driving home depressed at the news of Kennedy’s assassination and being harassed by a large, tailgating truck – was filmed as a TV movie in 1971 by Spielberg and gave the young director his first big critical success. Again, Matheson wrote the script. Duel-the-movie has motorist Dennis Weaver and the psychopathic driver of a 1955 Peterbilt 281 truck get into a deadly game of cat and mouse around the roads and highways of rural California. We never see the truck driver himself, just his immense, bellowing, dinosaur-like vehicle. Duel is the archetypal man-versus-machine story and, again, has been influential. Stephen King basically rewrote it (but upped the ante by adding lots of malevolent vehicles) with his short story Trucks, which he later filmed as Maximum Overdrive (1986).

The made-for-television movies that filled American TV schedules in the 1970s kept Matheson busy. As well as Duel he scripted The Night Stalker (1972) about a reporter called Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) who investigates a series of killings in modern-day Los Angeles and discovers that the perpetrator is a vampire. The Night Stalker was successful enough to eventually spawn a TV show called Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974-75), also starring McGavin, in which Kolchak investigated other strange cases involving monsters and supernatural phenomena. Though short-lived, the show was a major inspiration for Chris Carter, whose massively popular The X-Files (1993-2018) had a similar theme. Carter acknowledged his debt to Kolchak by having Darren McGavin guest-star in two X-Files episodes.

Meanwhile, the TV anthology movie Trilogy of Terror, from 1975, was based on three of Matheson’s short stories. The first two segments are unmemorable, but the third one, which Matheson scripted from his story Prey, is great. It stars Karen Black as an insecure woman who tries to shore up her relationship with her boyfriend, a lecturer in social anthropology, by buying him an antique ‘Zuma fetish doll’ as a birthday present. The doll is a hideous-looking thing and sports a many-fanged grin resembling a Venus flytrap. Before she can give the doll to its intended recipient, it comes to violent, gibbering life and she spends the evening fighting it off in the confines of her apartment. Black’s plight is the inverse of the shrinking man’s. She’s normal-sized and the threat she faces is tiny, but terrifying. This also creates the template for Joe Dante’s movie Gremlins in 1984. In particular, the scene in Gremlins where Frances Lee McCain fights off a horde of the sneering, reptilian mini-monsters in her kitchen, employing a blender and a microwave oven as weapons, is very reminiscent of Trilogy of Terror.

When he wasn’t writing novels, short stories and television scripts, the ever-industrious Matheson was writing for the cinema. In the early 1960s, he scripted several of the movies based on works by Edgar Allen Poe that were made by American International Pictures and directed by Roger Corman: The House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Tales of Terror (1962) and The Raven (1963). All told, Matheson did a good job of preserving the original stories’ gloomy, clammy spirit, whilst meeting the commercial demands of a studio and a director who were already famous for their exploitation movies, and keeping engaged a star – Vincent Price – whose performances tended to slip into the knowingly hammy when his material bored him. The movies aren’t the most faithful adaptations of Poe, but they’re surely the most fondly remembered ones.

Matheson also worked on British movies. For AIP’s trans-Atlantic rival, Hammer Films, he scripted The Devil Rides Out in 1968 and managed to turn Dennis Wheatley’s bloated, reactionary novel about upstanding Anglo-Saxon aristocrats fighting a bunch of ghastly Satan-worshipping foreigners into something rather good. And in 1973, he adapted his haunted-house novel Hell House for the screen. The result was The Legend of Hell House, directed by John Hough and starring Roddy McDowall, Clive Revill, Pamela Franklin and Gayle Hunicutt as psychic investigators trying to get to the bottom of terrifying supernatural manifestations in the titular mansion. The movie’s ending, which has the surviving investigators finding a hidden sanctum where the psychic forces are emanating from an embalmed body, played by a very un-embalmed-looking Michael Gough, is pretty stupid, which Matheson himself admitted. Still, John Hough directs the film’s scary set-pieces with vigour and there’s an unsettling electronic score by Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson.

Matheson was a modest soul and in interviews he usually seemed puzzled that so many people could be so inspired by his work. He might have ended up a very rich man if, like his famously litigious contemporary Harlan Ellison, he’d bothered to sue every filmmaker and writer who’d ripped off his ideas. Mind you, he’d probably have spent all his time in court, so I’m glad he just turned the other cheek and devoted that time instead to writing his marvellous stories.