Your guide to a week's worth of fantastically horrifying Halloween art and entertainment

Friday 10/23/26

We have a week until Halloween, so I thought what I'd do is put together a kind of programming guide covering TV, film, radio, music, the spoken, and literature if you want to have yourself a whale of a horror week, with an emphasis on things that most people aren't going to know. Obviously you want to make sure to pay a call on the classic early Universal monsters in Dracula, Frankenstein (yes, I'm calling him Frankenstein) and his Bride, and the Wolf Man, and there isn't a better film for Halloween than 1959's House on Haunted Hill, but allow me to serve (though don't expect me to call make like Igor and call you "master") as your guide down a slightly different fog-strewn path.

We'll start with W.W. Jacobs' 1902 story, "The Toll-House." Jacobs is best known for "The Monkey's Paw," which is one of those stories you know in some form or other even if you don't know it as in having read it. The toll-house of "The Toll-House" isn't the kind of toll-house you're probably thinking; that is, a little booth where someone takes your money and let's you pass on your way. Rather, it's a house that takes a toll, as in lives from those who live or go there.

Four well-to-do young English guys are drinking in an inn during what we sense is some lazy, far-ranging holiday because they don't work. They learn about this infamous toll-house, and decide, after closing time, that they'll go there for a lark. One of the four says he'd rather not, despite being a self-professed non-believer, and presumably with nothing to fear. Jacobs wrote well. He could build tension in swift, thick strokes.

This next one technically is in the television category, but we'll treat it like a radio play. Mystery and Imagination was a British TV anthology series running from 1966 to 1970 that specialized in classic horror. Unfortunately, most of the episodes no longer exist...but they have their own ghosts. That is, their audio survives! Well, for a handful of episodes. It's faint audio, too, like you're listening in on something from the beyond! I know you're scared now. Use headphones and listen to the audio from the adaptations of M.R. James's "Lost Hearts," that went out on March 5, 1966, and "Room 13," which was broadcast on October 22 of that same year, these being two of James's most Halloween-friendly stories.

We'll keep it in 1966 with this one: the album Christopher Lee made of him reading an abridged version of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Lee was a literary purist. He always wanted to play the Count on the screen as Stoker wrote him, but the Hammer films he'd done to date didn't afford him that chance. He makes up for it here. I'm not a huge audio readings guy. If the stories were written to be read aloud, as with M.R. James's early stories, I dig that like caretaker in a cemetery making a fresh hole in the ground for another burial. Or else if it's T.S. Eliot reading his verse or some special cases like this one, which is, as I said, a truncation rather than Christopher Lee sitting there for twelve hours having at the full text. I listen to this a lot throughout the year, in addition to reading the novel every couple years.

The Hall of Fantasy has a case for the most consistently frightening show in radio history and even stronger one among the mid-century shows as the bleakest. This is what Eeyore would choose to listen to on Halloween. Happy endings weren't the preferred Hall of Fantasy way. But the lingering sensation of dread pressing down on your soul? Plenty of that!

"He Who Follows Me" from March 3, 1950 is a kind of adaptation of M.R. James's "Count Magnus," which is also one of the author's most Halloween-friendly stories; a territorially possessive vampire--actually, a guy who sucks faces clean off--exits his tomb and proves hard to shake. To be fair, the caretaker tells the husband and wife of the story that they're screwed on account of an oversight, and let's just say that The Hall of Fantasy didn't much care for dramatic irony either because the characters know they're screwed just like we're probably all screwed in the end. "The Shadow People" from September 5, 1952 is, if anything, more terrifying and grim. It could actually give you nightmares. Listen to it in the dark--trust me.

One used to be able to say, "You've probably heard of Orson Welles's 1938 broadcast of 'The War of the Worlds,'" but you can't really do that anymore, because people typically have heard of and know nothing that isn't on popping up without them having gone looking for it on the screen in front of them. But what very few have ever heard of is the 1968 WKBW broadcast of "The War of the Worlds" out of Buffalo, and fewer still who weren't in that area around that time. WKBW would try and do something special for Halloween and their efforts in the late 1960s and into the 1970s are a true treasure.

They ran with a Paul McCartney "Paul is Dead" bit in 1969. In 1973, they remade Arch Oboler's (the horror radio titan who took over Lights Out after Wyllis Cooper left) "The Dark" (which no one had heard since it originally aired in 1937 and was then lost), put together a history of vampires, and produced an adaptation of our boy W.W. Jacobs' "The Monkey's Paw" in 1973. You get the idea. Legend has it that people flipped out over that '68 broadcast of H.G. Wells' story just as they did with Orson Welles and his crew thirty years before. Clearly WKBW took Halloween seriously. As we all should.

We've talked about a few of these works before, but I think it's okay to bring them back up again in the cause of a spooky project, so in that spirit (boo), let's recommend the "The Corpse Can't Play" episode of Late Night Horror, which I feel obligated to do given that it's the only episode that survives of this BBC series with the disturbing intro that lasted for all of five weeks, and it has kids at a party, which used to be a Halloween thing (see Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party and It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, as well as my own boyhood and early school days). No one you know has ever seen it, so after you watch it you can show it to them and they'll be cursed and die. Wait, maybe I'm mixing some stuff together. Either way, you haven't seen it, so do.

If I had to guess, I'd say that most casual fans of The Twilight Zone prefer the show to be scary. What I think is quite clearly the best episode in "Walking Distance" isn't in the horror vein (then again, it's a bit more complicated than that). The second best episode, "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street," is in the horror and sociological vein. Effective stuff, both ways. A couple years ago in this record, I considered what to me are the half dozen scariest episodes of the show.

Missing from that number was "The Fear," the penultimate Zone episode and the last penned by creator Rod Serling, which doesn't mean it isn't scary. Now, the ending might be a bit of a cop out in the Mark of the Vampire (1935) sense, but do you want mood? Because this has plenty of it, and mood is a vital horror component.

A highway trooper is sent to a remote cabin to look in on an NYC fashion magazine editor who's had a nervous breakdown and matters don't go so hot out in the sticks as an unnatural presence in the surrounding woods begins to assert itself. Lights flash, craters are created, the phone goes dead, there are these giant fingerprints. The pair spend one hell of a bad night together. Hazel Court (The Curse of Frankenstein, The Masque of the Red Death) plays the magazine editor.

I feel like it's popular and has been for many years now to rip on 1999's The Blair Witch Project for reasons that have nothing to do with the film itself as a film. I'm not concerned with any of that, nor the marketing angle and how that helped make the film a hit. I care about the work. And this particularly cinematic work, along with 1951's Scrooge, which I felt strongly enough to write a book about, 1931's Frankenstein, 1951's Return to Glennascaul, and 1968's Night of the Living Dead, is what I'd consider a perfect horror film.

No horror film better embodies the workings of horror. Look at the role the imagination plays. In my view, the greatest horror stems from what appears to be simple but isn't actually. An unknown sound in the night. Or seeing someone way out in the woods where you don't expect to see anyone at all after you've been out there for hours. They could just be someone on their own hike. The noise could be a branch against the window.

No film shows greater mastery of this core, crucial horror tenet than The Blair Witch Project. I think it's brilliant. I can't say enough positive things about it. The film understands the role that people have in heightening terror, how much of that comes from the inside, or can. I wouldn't have a problem saying it's the best American horror film there is.

Now that I've made my position plain, I'm going to make a bit of a detour here, because chances are one has seen The Blair Witch Project, but they likely haven't seen The Blair Witch Project - Extended Sight FINAL CUT which is a three-hour fan-compiled edit of the 1999 film with deleted scenes, outtakes, documentary footage incorporated. Now, this unofficial film isn't perfect, but it's a dynamite watch all the same, and a different way to enjoy a great treat.