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Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 208 из 359There was "The Thirty-Fathom Grave," in which the crew of a Navy destroyer hears ghosts tapping inside a sunken submarine; "Printer's Devil"; "The New Exhibit" (one of The Twilight Zone's few excursions into outright horror, this dealt with a wax museum janitor played by Martin Balsam who discovers that the Murderers' Row exhibit has come to life); and "Miniature," which starred Robert Duvall in a Charles Beaumont script about a man who escapes back into the gay nineties. , As Naha points out, by its final season "no one at CBS really cared about the series." He goes on to say that ABC, which had had some success with The Outer Limits , extended feelers to Serling about doing a sixth season with them. Serling refused. "I think ABC wanted to make a trip to the graveyard every week," he said.
For Serling, life was never quite the same. The angry young man who had written Patterns began doing television commercials-that unmistakable voice could be heard huckstering tires and cold remedies in a bizarre turn that recalls the broken fighter in Requiem for a Heavyweight who ends up performing in fixed wrestling matches. And in 1970 lie began making that "trip to the graveyard every week," not on ABC but on NBC, as host and sometime writer of Night Gallery . The series was inevitably compared to The Twilight Zone in spite of the fact that Gallery was really a watered-down Thriller with Serling doing the Boris Karloff hosting job.
Serling had none of the creative control he had enjoyed while doing The Twilight Zone . (He complained at one point that the studio was trying to turn Night Gallery "into Mannix with a shroud.") Nonetheless, Night Gallery produced a number of interesting episodes, including adaptations of H. P. Lovecraft's "Cool Air" and "Pickman's Model." It also presented an episode which must rate as one of the most frightening ever telecast on TV. "Boomerang," based on a story by Oscar Cook, dealt with a little bug called an earwig. The earwig is placed in the villain's ear and began to-ulp!-chew its way through his brain, leaving the man in an excruciating, sweaty state of agony (the physiological reason for this, since the brain has no nerves, is never explained). He is told there's only one chance in a billion that the pesky little beast will actually chew on a straight course across to his other ear and thus find the exit; much more likely is the possibility that it will just continue chewing its way around in there until the fellow goes mad . . . or commits suicide. The viewer is immensely relieved when the nearimpossible happens and the earwig actually does come out the other side . . . and then, the kicker comes: the earwig was female. And it laid eggs in there. Millions of them.
For Serling, life was never quite the same. The angry young man who had written Patterns began doing television commercials-that unmistakable voice could be heard huckstering tires and cold remedies in a bizarre turn that recalls the broken fighter in Requiem for a Heavyweight who ends up performing in fixed wrestling matches. And in 1970 lie began making that "trip to the graveyard every week," not on ABC but on NBC, as host and sometime writer of Night Gallery . The series was inevitably compared to The Twilight Zone in spite of the fact that Gallery was really a watered-down Thriller with Serling doing the Boris Karloff hosting job.
Serling had none of the creative control he had enjoyed while doing The Twilight Zone . (He complained at one point that the studio was trying to turn Night Gallery "into Mannix with a shroud.") Nonetheless, Night Gallery produced a number of interesting episodes, including adaptations of H. P. Lovecraft's "Cool Air" and "Pickman's Model." It also presented an episode which must rate as one of the most frightening ever telecast on TV. "Boomerang," based on a story by Oscar Cook, dealt with a little bug called an earwig. The earwig is placed in the villain's ear and began to-ulp!-chew its way through his brain, leaving the man in an excruciating, sweaty state of agony (the physiological reason for this, since the brain has no nerves, is never explained). He is told there's only one chance in a billion that the pesky little beast will actually chew on a straight course across to his other ear and thus find the exit; much more likely is the possibility that it will just continue chewing its way around in there until the fellow goes mad . . . or commits suicide. The viewer is immensely relieved when the nearimpossible happens and the earwig actually does come out the other side . . . and then, the kicker comes: the earwig was female. And it laid eggs in there. Millions of them.