Discover the Lost Horror Series Deemed Too Shocking for BBC Television (1967)

High cul­ture and new tech­nol­o­gy have nev­er been a nat­ur­al pair­ing. As our dig­i­tal era has often under­scored, media inno­va­tions tend to be adopt­ed ear­li­est to deliv­er the most puerile, sen­sa­tion-dri­ven con­tent, with the more respectable stuff ben­e­fit­ing only lat­er. When the BBC was intro­duc­ing col­or broad­cast­ing in the mid-nine­teen-six­ties, for instance, it was used for the likes of Thun­der­birds, The Avengers, and The Ben­ny Hill Show, respectable though those pro­grams may now seem com­pared to what main­stream tele­vi­sion would become in lat­er decades.

No col­or pro­duc­tion of that peri­od aimed quite as low as the anthol­o­gy series Late Night Hor­ror — or has since been raised so high in the minds of those who remem­ber it. As cul­tur­al leg­end has it, only six episodes were broad­cast before com­plaints about its pow­er to shock and dis­turb, or per­haps con­cerns about its increas­ing extrem­i­ty, got it the axe from BBC man­age­ment. The idea that Late Night Hor­ror was sim­ply too scary for tele­vi­sion — or British pub­lic tele­vi­sion of the late six­ties, in any case — has become more com­pelling over the decades in part because so lit­tle of the series itself has sur­vived to receive the judg­ment of lat­er gen­er­a­tions of view­ers.

Only in 2016 did archivists dis­cov­er a film copy of “The Corpse Can’t Play,” a sto­ry set at a chil­dren’s par­ty that takes a dead­ly turn. Writ­ten by the pro­lif­ic Eng­lish nov­el­ist John Burke, the episode’s slow burn leads up to a grotesque fin­ish that con­trasts almost cheek­i­ly with the mun­dane domes­tic­i­ty of its set­ting. Alas, the recov­ered print was in black-and-white, so we don’t get to see the col­ors, san­guineous and oth­er­wise, that would have made such an impact on view­ers of near­ly six decades ago.

Just this year, anoth­er episode was redis­cov­ered: “No Such Thing as a Vam­pire” by Richard Math­e­son, author of I Am Leg­end and no few­er than six­teen Twi­light Zone episodes. As of now, the oth­er four episodes remain miss­ing, and pre­sum­ably erased under the per­pet­u­al­ly cash-strapped BBC’s pol­i­cy of eras­ing tapes for re-use in the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. One of them, “William and Mary,” was based on a Roald Dahl sto­ry that had been pre­vi­ous­ly adapt­ed in 1961 for the series Way Out, and would be adapt­ed again in 1979 for Tales of the Unex­pect­ed.

At this point, even if a com­plete set of Late Night Hor­ror tapes were to turn up in some­one’s shed, the real­i­ty of the show could hard­ly be expect­ed to com­pete with what its scat­tered frag­ments — espe­cial­ly its still-chill­ing open­ing sequence — inspire us to imag­ine. As every seri­ous hor­ror fan knows, it’s what we don’t see that scares us most. Watch The Twi­light Zone’s Pilot Episode, Pitched by Rod Ser­ling Him­self (1959) Alfred Hitch­cock Presents a Chill­ing Tale by Roald Dahl (1960) When Roald Dahl Host­ed His Own Creepy TV Show Way Out, a Com­pan­ion to Rod Serling’s Twi­light Zone (1961) Alfred Hitch­cock Presents Ghost Sto­ries for Kids (1962) Watch the Sesame Street Episode Banned for Being Too Scary, Fea­tur­ing The Wiz­ard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West (1976) Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture.

He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall. by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Comments (0) | We’re hop­ing to rely on our loy­al read­ers rather than errat­ic ads. To sup­port Open Cul­ture’s edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion, please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion.