Monthly Archives: October 2017

Episode 1093: The Shrinking Shares

Sam Hall, September 1970,

“How can this be? There is no room!”

“You asked what would happen to you,” says the ghost, directing the children’s attention to a nearby dollhouse. “Look through the window. Find out.”

So they look through the window, and they see Allen Ludden, giving the first word to Jack Klugman and Brett Somers. The word is “caterpillar”.

Brett chooses to pass, so the first turn goes to Jack and some housewife from Indiana. Jack says “moth,” but Indiana can’t figure it out, so they lose their turn, and it goes to Brett and some housewife from Kentucky. Brett tries “butterfly,” but Kentucky’s at a loss.

They punt back to Jack, who says “crawl”, and the light dawns on Indiana. “Caterpillar!” she cries, and she gets eight points.

This is what will happen to them. It’s called Password.

Continue reading Episode 1093: The Shrinking Shares →

Episode 1091: You, the Living

August 1970, Joe Caldwell, , ,

“I know I shouldn’t summon you, but won’t you appear to me?”

It’s exactly midnight, obviously, and in walks Maggie Evans, dazed and consumed.

She’s come home from a brisk walk that she took through the pitch-black dystopian nightmare surrounding her extremely haunted house. She was just going out for a bite, she said, and look what happened.

Julia sees Maggie stumble through the door, and she knows at once that something is amiss; Maggie’s head is traveling south, while her heels are trending north-north-east. You don’t have to be a doctor to tell that she’s in a bad way, although Julia is a doctor, so even more so.

Julia says, “Maggie, what is it?” as the girl topples over, but you know what it is, as well as I do. It’s vampires, is what it is.

Continue reading Episode 1091: You, the Living →

Episode 1090: Today’s Ten Things That Make No Sense

August 1970, Gordon Russell, , , , ,

“It’s a terrible thing to be frightened by something you can’t see!”

#1. So let me get this straight. Gerard is a ghost, and he’s evil, and he’s in charge of young David, who’s being intermittently possessed by another ghost named Tad. Gerard has left a note in an old book that tells a crew of dead pirates to wait for somebody to wave a green flag three times in the window of the tower room of a mansion that Gerard is haunting. David reads the note and decides that Gerard wants him to wave the flag, which will magically raise this circle of criminals and misfits from the dead, to do Gerard’s dark bidding.

Then David goes upstairs to the tower room, and finds that there really is a green flag there which nobody has noticed for the last hundred and thirty years. The boy waves the green flag twice, which causes the dirt on the pirates’ graves to bubble and boil, but before anything interesting happens, David suddenly realizes that Gerard doesn’t want him to wave the flag after all, and the ghost expresses his displeasure by messing around with a theremin for a while.

I don’t know what happens to the flag, maybe it’s supposed to sit up there in the tower room for another hundred and thirty years. Wake me up when we hit 2099, so I have some time to prepare.

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Episode 1089: Standing on Graves

August 1970, Gordon Russell, , ,

“That bust was there in the future because you placed it there now!”

“We should be grateful that nothing has happened for the last two days!” says Hallie.

“That’s what’s bugging me most,” David moans. “Why hasn’t anything happened?”

The answer, I suppose, is because Barnabas is out of town, telling Women’s Wear Daily what he thinks about his new movie. Also, the writers may be running out of ideas.

Continue reading Episode 1089: Standing on Graves →

Episode 1088: The Summer of Our Discontent

August 1970, Sam Hall, , , , ,

“Don’t you feel the evil in this room?”

If it seems like the Collinwood halls are filled with more ghosts and fewer people than usual, that’s because three of the stars — Jonathan Frid, Kathryn Leigh Scott and Nancy Barrett — are out this week on separate press tours for House of Dark Shadows, the feature film which keeps on finding ways to make the show worse.

In the film, Jonathan Frid plays a vampire, Kathryn Leigh Scott plays a girl, and Nancy Barrett plays a girl vampire, so she wins. You see a lot of Carolyn-the-vampire images in the promotional materials, because that’s the traditional early-70s horror movie draw — a pretty girl in a flimsy nightgown, with blood all over her face. This was the period after they invented red paint and before they invented slasher movies, so sometimes the girls had to go and get bloody some other way.

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Episode 1087: Stranger Things

August 1970, Sam Hall, , ,

“What makes you think that you can describe a man from my dream?”

What do you think they were doing, all that time?

Gerard Stiles is an evil pirate-sorceror-ghost, an advanced energy-being with the power to control people’s minds, by either hypnotizing them or, if necessary, dropping heavy objects on them. He’s got a governess gun-moll sidekick who can magically seduce romantic leads, and two teenage enforcers who can convince kids to turn on their own families. He can utterly destroy Collinwood, and kill everyone who lives there, one at a time or in handfuls.

So what do you think he was thinking a year and a half ago, when some young upstart named Quentin Collins kyped his whole strategy? I mean, there’s Gerard, just biding his time until a blonde girl showed up, and all of a sudden, Quentin and Beth jump the line, and start doing exactly what Gerard has been planning to do since fifty-seven years before Quentin even died. And they failed, obviously, because they were noobs who didn’t even have a single zombie.

Now that Gerard’s pushed the button and put his own plan into operation, he can finally show everyone how to follow through on a Turn of the Screw-themed extreme home makeover. But when Gerard goes to his girlfriend’s room, he finds her kissing on — guess who? — Quentin Collins.

No way, Gerard emits. Are you kidding me? Fuck that guy.

Continue reading Episode 1087: Stranger Things →

Episode 1086: A Sense of Something

August 1970, Joe Caldwell, ,

“I don’t want to encourage them, and their ridiculous prophecies.”

There’s a mystery door in the west wing of Collinwood, as I’m sure there is in many of our homes, and when you open it, you either get a linen closet, or a malevolent playroom that eats children. This is an inconvenient way to run a corridor, especially if you just want to put the towels away.

But today, instead of the two usual options, David and Hallie discover a third — a magical stairway into time, operated by ancestors. The ghosts of Tad and Carrie are standing at the top of the phantom staircase, urging their descendants to — well, I’ll let them explain.

“Come! Please, come!” they say. “Hurry! Hurry! Don’t keep us waiting, please!”

“Follow us! Come! Please, come!” they continue, further refining their message. “Hurry! Follow us! Please, don’t keep us waiting!”

“Hurry! Hurry!” they recapitulate, hearkening back to a previous motif. “Please, come! Come! Come with us, please!” This must be what an elevator pitch used to be like, back before there were elevators, and you had to do it on the stairs.

This sequence is a lot like being on the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland and getting your car stuck right at the end, when the ghost lady says, “Hurry baa-ack, hurry ba-aaack! Be sure to bring your death certificate” over and over while you just sit there and watch, except that the Dark Shadows version is actually trying to kill me.

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Episode 1085: Our Ignorance and Folly

August 1970, Joe Caldwell, , , , ,

“David, they’re nowhere in the room! They’re dead people! They’re ghosts! And we look exactly like them!”

There is no such thing as time. There’s only space, physical space, and it is space that measures the distance between those points which we, in our ignorance and folly, insist are points in time. All time is one point, one moment, it is ever existent and it is ever accessible, and it is physical space that can be used to make all time easily accessible. Well, physical space and LSD, obviously.

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Episode 1084: 100 Things That I Would Like David and Hallie to See When They Open the Playroom Door, in No Particular Order

August 1970, Gordon Russell, ,

“If he himself can transcend time mentally, he should be willing to accept the fact that it can be transcended physically.”

To be honest, there’s not a huge hell of a lot happening on the show right now. Two kids are inching their way towards being supernaturally swapped for two other kids, one of the romantic leads is being catfished by a ghost, and there are two independent story threads about a main character hoping that a secondary character will turn out to be a dead person that they used to know. None of these storylines are particularly compelling, and they don’t cross over with each other at all. It feels like the writers have gotten into a rut, and decided to stay there.

Usually, the thing that extricates us from this kind of morass is the show’s insistence on having an exciting cliffhanger at the end of every episode, but even that has failed us. This week, there are four episodes in a row that end in exactly the same way — David and Hallie open the playroom door, and then gape in open-mouthed astonishment at whatever they see.

In episode 1082, they open the door and see a dollhouse, with little dolls inside that they recognize from their shared dream. In episode 1083, they open the door and see that the dolls that they burned in the fireplace are back in the dollhouse. In episode 1084, they open the door and see Tad and Carrie, reading from David’s notebook. And in episode 1085, they open the door and see Tad and Carrie again, standing on a staircase.

And that doesn’t even count episode 1074, where they open the door and see the linen closet; episode 1075, where they open the door and see the playroom for the first time; and episode 1080, where Hallie opens the door and sees Tad, and then turns around and opens the door and sees David.

It’s possible that they’re going to keep doing this from now until the end of time, and there’s nothing I can do but try to make it more enjoyable for everyone. Here is my list of 100 things I would like David and Hallie to see when they open the playroom door.

Continue reading Episode 1084: 100 Things That I Would Like David and Hallie to See When They Open the Playroom Door, in No Particular Order →