Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

Yearsafter Thriller , a production company associated with NBC-the network upon which Thriller was telecast-optioned three stories from my 1978 collection, Night Shift , and invited me to do the screenplay. One of these stories was a piece called "Strawberry Spring," about a psychopathic Jack-the-Ripper-type killer who is roaming a fogbound college campus. About a month after turning the script in, I got a call from an NBC munchkin at Standards and Practices (read: The Department of Censorship).

*And some say it was the single most frightening story ever done on TV. I would disagree with that. My own nominee for that honor would be the final episode of a little-remembered program called Bus Stop (adapted from the William Inge play and film). The series, a straight drama show, was canceled following the furor over an episode starring then rock star Fabian Forte as a psychopathic rapist-the episode was based on a Tom Wicker novel. The final episode, however, deviated wildly into the supernatural, and for me, Robert Bloch's adaptation of his own short story "I Kiss Your Shadow" has never been beaten on TV-and rarely anywhere else-for eerie, mounting horror.

The knife my killer used to commit his murders had to go, the munchkin said. The killer could stay, but the knife had to go. Knives were too phallic. I suggested we turn the killer into a strangler. The munchkin evinced great enthusiasm. I hung up, feeling like a very brilliant fellow, and turned the stabber into, a strangler. The script was finally coughed out of the network's large and voracious gullet by Standards and Practices, however, strangler and all. Too gruesome and intense was the final verdict.

I guess none of them remembered Patricia Barry in "A Wig for Miss DeVore.”

3

Blackness on the TV screen.

Then there's a picture there-some kind of picture-but it's rolling helplessly at first, then losing horizontal resolution.

Black again, broken by a single wavy white line, oscillating hypnotically.

The voice accompanying all this is quiet, reasonable.

" There it nothing wrong with your TV set. We are controlling transmission, We can control the vertical. We can control the horizontal. For the next hour we will control all you see and hear and think. You are watching a drama which reaches from the inner mind to . . . the Outer Limits .” Nominally science fiction, more actually a horror program, The Outer Limits was, perhaps, after Thriller , the best program of its type ever to run on network TV.