The Unofficial Robert Bloch Website

Essays

When Robert Bloch died at the age of seventy-seven on September 23, 1994, he left a lasting legacy of literary, cinematic, and televised terror that spanned six decades and encompassed two dozen novels--including the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece, Psycho (1960)--countless radio, TV and film scripts, and more than a thousand short stories. Conducted shortly before his death, my interview with Bloch was published in Filmfax #40, and focused primarily on his feature films, most notably those written for William Castle (Strait-Jacket and The Night Walker, both 1964) and Amicus: The Psychopath (1966), The Deadly Bees (1967), Torture Garden (1967), The House That Dripped Blood (1970), and Asylum (1972). But like many of his friends and fellow writers such as Charles Beaumont, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, George Clayton Johnson, Richard Matheson, and Jerry Sohl, Bloch also plunged enthusiastically into the then-burgeoning medium of television, where he was an almost constant presence for thirty years.

Surprisingly, Bloch's television career began outside the fantasy genre in the fall of 1959 when, as he related in his delightful "unauthorized autobiography," Once Around the Bloch, "My friend and colleague Samuel A. Peeples [called and] wanted to know if I'd like to come out to Hollywood and write a script for Lock-Up." Produced by the low-budget ZIV studios, known to genre aficionados for such seminal SF series as Science Fiction Theater and Men into Space, the show featured Macdonald Carey, formerly the romantic lead in Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943), as Herbert L. Maris, a real-life Philadelphia attorney who specialized in freeing those wrongly convicted. "What appealed to me about the show was that its hero wasn't a gun-toter like the ones in the omnipresent westerns of that period, and his problems were frequently solved by brains rather than brawn. But the major appeal lay in Sam Peeples's proposal itself. Another writer, Frank Gruber, had been responsible for bringing him into television and now he wanted to confer a similar favor on me.

"Knowing I wasn't interested in routine shoot-em-up shows, he thought this one might be more to my taste. Since he'd done a number of episodes himself, he approached the story editor and recommended me for an assignment. Thirty years ago such things, while uncommon, were not yet impossible. And Lock-Up was produced for syndication by Ziv, an outfit which was always happy to buy material for a song. All they were willing to warble for me was an offer to purchase one half-hour script for the lowest possible price allowed under the terms of their contractual agreement. Whether or not they liked what I might write was, of course, impossible to foresee in advance. Should Ziv be dissatisfied with what I did, Sam would do a script of his own. Meantime he generously offered to lodge me while I tackled the assignment. This was my chance to discover if I could write for television for fun and profit." Clearly, he could, with "Murder Is a Gamble," "Voice of Doom," "Death and Texas," "Beau and Arrow," and "Abandoned Mine" among his half-dozen episodes.

Along the way, he also acquired a membership in the Writers Guild of America, "a lavish one-room furnished apartment in Studio City" across from the former Republic Studio, and an agent, Gordon Molson, who would represent him for the next twenty-two years until Molson's death. Bloch eventually did try his hand at a Western, noting that "because of my film work [beginning with The Couch (1961)], most of the stories I sold to television had to be adapted by other writers during this period. I do recall squeezing in (or out) an episode for Whispering Smith, an undistinguished western series starring the distinguished war hero Audie Murphy [who had played himself in the 1955 Universal biopic To Hell and Back]. My motives were ultra-ulterior; I wrote '[The] Poet and Peasant [Case]' [8/28/61] to showcase one of my longtime favorite actors, Alan Mowbray, as a character very similar to Oscar but not quite so Wilde." Production of the series began in 1959 but was halted due to an injury to co-star Guy Mitchell; it aired at last on NBC from May to September of 1961.

Aptly, the man who will be forever identified as the "author of Psycho" was most closely associated on television with the long-running anthology series hosted by its director, first in a half-hour format as Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-62) and then as The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962-65), shuttling back and forth between CBS and NBC over the years. While Bloch was working on Lock-Up, he wrote, "across town, other writers were adapting two of my stories, 'The Cure' [1/24/60] and what they retitled 'Is Betsy Blake Still Alive?' purchased for Alfred Hitchcock Presents"; after yet another title change, Bloch's short story "Betsy Blake Will Live Forever" was eventually televised as "Madame Mystery" (3/27/60). That and "The Cure" were the first of a whopping seventeen episodes of the Hitchcock series to be written by Bloch and/or based on his work during the show's ten-year run, more than his friends Beaumont, Bradbury, Ellison, Matheson and Sohl put together, although fellow contributor Henry Slesar provided more stories and teleplays than any other single writer.

Published in Playboy in 1957, "The Cure" is set in "the godforsaken backwaters of Brazil," where Jeff is hiding out with Mike, his partner in an armored-truck robbery; Marie, his girlfriend; and Luiz, his devoted Indian servant, who has brought them to his village while they wait for a Cuban, Gonzales, to exchange the loot for pesos and send their share. Driven mad by weeks of waiting in the hot, rainy, bug-infested jungle, Marie slashes Jeff's ankle with a machete before she is subdued by Luiz, who obligingly offers to kill her, and Jeff agrees to Mike's suggestion that he and Luiz take her to a psychiatrist in Belém while Jeff's ankle heals and he waits for the runner from Gonzales to arrive with their money. When Luiz at last returns alone, he reveals that Mike had received the money before leaving and plotted with Marie to kill him, but after the money fell in the river during a fight in which he killed Mike, Luiz took all too literally Jeff's desire that the captive Marie be brought to a "headshrinker," and proudly produces the shriveled proof of his "good job."

The first of Bloch's stories to appear on Alfred Hitchcock Presents was adapted for the screen by British playwright Michael Pertwee, whose brother Jon later became the third incarnation of Dr. Who on the BBC's eponymous long-running science fiction series, and starred in the segment of The House That Dripped Blood based on Bloch's "The Cloak." Formerly a dialogue director at Warner Brothers from 1944 to 1951, director Herschel Daugherty was now launched on a twenty-year television career that encompassed episodes of thirty-odd series such as The Man and Girl from U.N.C.L.E., Star Trek, The Time Tunnel, Mission: Impossible, Ghost Story (aka Circle of Fear), and The Six Million Dollar Man. Perhaps best known for Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954), Israeli actor Nehemiah Persoff starred as Jeff Jenson in the televised version, which somewhat blunted Bloch's theme of thieves falling out and receiving their just deserts by depicting Jeff and Mike (Mark Richman) as exploring for oil in the Amazon, and Marie (Cara Williams) as Jeff's wife.

German-born Hollywood veteran John Brahm directed "Madame Mystery," as well as two subsequent Bloch-related Hitchcock teleplays and a record-setting twelve episodes of the original Twilight Zone, while William Fay adapted the show from Bloch's "Betsy Blake Will Live Forever," which was originally published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 1958. Struggling writer Steve (Harp McGuire) is working on his novel in a beachfront cottage when his neighbor, young studio flack Jimmy Dolan (Joby Baker), offers him a lucrative job helping to build a legend around "Madame Mystery," a secretive star killed in a speedboat accident, to maintain public interest until her last film, Splendor, opens in three months. Steve reluctantly agrees, but after Betsy Blake (Audrey Totter) appears at the cottage, having survived the crash and been rescued by a fishing trawler, Jimmy pushes the drunken slattern to her death to protect his p.r. campaign, and when Steve observes while dialing the police, "You'd kill your own mother to be a big man at Goliath Studios," Jimmy reveals he just has.

Gordon Molson and his associates had already started to take the fledgling fortyish screenwriter around Hollywood and introduce him to producers and executives at various concerns. Describing his first meeting with the staff of Alfred Hitchcock Presents at Universal Studios, Bloch noted that, "For the record, these events took place in the late fall of 1959. Contrary to published accounts by no-accounts who didn't do their homework, I had no previous personal contacts whatsoever with either Mr. Hitchcock or his television show. They had nothing to do with my coming to Hollywood; nor did the success of the film version of Psycho. As a matter of fact, the picture was still being shot when I arrived at the studio for the first time. And I later learned that Joan Harrison, the producer of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, shared the grave reservations of many associates regarding this film venture. So much for the notion that Psycho launched me on a television and film career. At this stage of the game my identification with the novel was more handicap than help....

"The reason for my meeting with the Hitchcock people was simple enough. They'd purchased those two short stories adapted for the television show by other writers and they'd learned that I wrote for television myself. So what could be more logical than to call me in to do a television script from a story by another writer? At least that's the way they were thinking at the time. Who was I to dispute them? Particularly not when they offered me Frank Mace's story 'The Cuckoo Clock' for adaptation. I said I'd think it over (which I did, for almost five seconds) and departed to prowl around the lot. I zeroed in on 'the Phantom stage,' the theater interior of the Paris Opera House, which was still standing and frequently used for other films. To my surprise, it was much smaller than I'd expected, but this was where it all started for me on film a third of a century ago. I returned a few days later when, by remarkable coincidence, this became the stage where Psycho was being shot....[and a brief visit marked] my first and only personal association with the filming of Psycho."

Hired by Hitchcock as his personal secretary in 1935, Harrison had worked her way quickly up through the ranks from continuity assistant and script consultant to dialogue writer; graduating to scenarist with Jamaica Inn (1939), she shared Oscar nominations for Rebecca and Foreign Correspondent (both 1940), and also co-wrote Suspicion (1941). She was brought back into the fold to oversee the series, having struck out on her own as a producer after Saboteur (1942), while associate producer and former Mercury Player Norman Lloyd, who essayed the title role in the same film, succeeded her as executive producer when she left yet again to devote more time to her marriage with author and screenwriter Eric Ambler. Likewise, the show's story editor, Berlin-born Gordon Hessler, later succeeded Lloyd as associate producer, and directed The Oblong Box (1969), Scream and Scream Again, Cry of the Banshee (both 1970), and The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1971) for American International Pictures (AIP) in England before returning to U.S. television.

Bloch enjoyed an unusually cordial relationship with these key staff members, and in "My Hitch with Hitchcock," an introductory essay he wrote for John McCarty and Brian Kelleher's book Alfred Hitchcock Presents: An Illustrated Guide to the Ten-Year Television Career of the Master of Suspense, he related, "the British custom of four o'clock tea was scrupulously and sumptuously observed in Joan Harrison's private office. It was a far cry from the usual producer's offer of instant coffee in a paper cup, and somehow it summed up and symbolized the style of the show itself. I had other reasons to be grateful to my hosts and hostess. Early on in our relationship, a writer living three thousand miles away popped up with a claim that my story 'The Cure' was a plagiarism. At that time I was still pretty much of an unknown quantity as far as the Hitchcock team was concerned, and they could have been understandably forgiven had they ended our relationship then and there--for nothing distresses Hollywood producers more than possible involvement in a lawsuit.

"But once I assured them of my innocence they rallied to the rescue without further question. Upon investigation they discovered that the charges were completely unfounded; outside of its South American setting, my Playboy-published story--which, it developed, the accusing writer had never even read--bore no resemblance whatsoever to its supposed counterpart. There was no litigation and my reputation, thanks to their quick action and support, remained unsullied. The same held true after they bought and filmed a published story of mine which I scripted, 'The Sorceror's [sic] Apprentice.' When the network censors viewed the teleplay there was thunder from on high; this show was simply 'too gruesome' to be aired. Nobody called me on the carpet because of this capricious decision--and as a matter of fact, when the series went into syndication my show was duly televised without a word from the powers that be." Bloch added that Hitch himself, while rarely in attendance, "was nonetheless a palpable presence [whose] taste and standards" were always considered.

Also directed by Brahm, "The Cuckoo Clock" (4/17/60) begins as the widowed Ida Blythe (Beatrice Straight) and her daughter Dorothy (Hitchcock's own daughter Pat, who also appeared in Psycho the same year) stop for supplies en route to their remote summer cabin and learn from the loquacious shopkeeper, Burt (Don Beddoe), of an escaped mental patient. Dorothy reluctantly leaves Ida alone for the weekend, and when she returns to the cabin after fetching some firewood, Ida is shocked to see Madeline Hall (Fay Spain), a high-strung young woman who says she was frightened by a mysterious man watching her while she was painting nearby, and insists that is is he who knocks on the cabin door soon afterwards. An Oscar winner for Network (1976), Straight superbly portrays Ida's terror as she becomes convinced that Madeline is the mental patient, and when the knocking at the door resumes, she opens it to a man (Donald Buka) who warns her that the patient is female and dangerous, only to learn too late that it was indeed he as the man forces his way inside and kills Ida.

With the acceptance of "The Cuckoo Clock" and the offer of further work for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Bloch's career as a budding television writer seemed at last to be off and running, and then just as quickly stumbled with the announcement of a strike by the Writers Guild, which would begin on January first of the following year. This delayed his plans to bring his first wife, Marion, and their daughter, Sally, out to Hollywood from Weyauwega, a small town in upstate Wisconsin, forcing him to return to writing stories and articles while he waited for the strike to end, which took almost six months, and for Psycho to provide him with his first feature-film story credit. At a private pre-release screening, he told the director, "'Mr. Hitchcock, I think this is either going to be your greatest success or your biggest bomb.' Fortunately for Hitchcock (and for me) the first half of my prediction proved to be the case...[although] Psycho got better reviews as a book than it did as a film at the time. And thanks to the film, sales soared for the first six paperback editions."

That same season, Bloch also joined the writing staff of Thriller, another series produced by Universal's television arm, with similarly suspenseful stories, an instantly recognizable host in Boris Karloff, and many of the same personnel (e.g. Daugherty and Brahm, who with fifteen and eleven episodes, respectively, were its most frequent directors). Matheson adapted his only Thriller episode, "The Return of Andrew Bentley" (12/11/61), from a story by August Derleth and Mark Schorer, while Beaumont contributed a pair of teleplays, "Girl With a Secret" (11/15/60) and "Guillotine" (9/25/61), the latter based on a story by noir legend Cornell Woolrich, as was Hitchcock's classic film Rear Window (1954). But as with Alfred Hitchcock Presents and England's Amicus studios, which filmed Bloch's "The Skull of the Marquis de Sade" as The Skull (1965) before hiring him as a screenwriter, Bloch was recruited for Thriller--which initially aired immediately following the Hitchcock show on the same network, NBC--only after three of his stories had been adapted by others.

Stephen King called Thriller "probably the best horror series ever put on TV," noting in Danse Macabre that "after a slow first thirteen weeks, [it] was able to become something more than the stock imitation of Alfred Hitchcock Presents that it was apparently meant to be...and took on a tenebrous life of his own." According to Alan Warren's This Is a

Thriller

Both anthology shows relied primarily on previously published material, with the Hitchcock series drawing frequently from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and the host's eponymous counterpart, although some episodes of Thriller, like writer-director Shane's "Rose's Last Summer" (10/11/60)--made before his promotion to producer--were originals. Shane, who had already adapted Woolrich's work onscreen in Fear in the Night (1947) and Nightmare (1956), left after "Papa Benjamin" (3/21/61), the first of three episodes based thereon, and Frye, the show's sole credited producer for the remainder of its two-season run, soon gave it a distinctive flavor by mining the pages of the famed fantasy pulp, Weird Tales. It was there that Bloch had initially encountered the work of both H.P. Lovecraft, his mentor, and Derleth, a future friend and fellow protégé, and it quickly became his best-known magazine outlet, although not his first: contrary to some reports, his first sale, at the ripe old age of seventeen, was to Marvel Tales, where his story "Lilies" appeared in 1934.

Directed by Brahm and written by the show's most prolific contributor, Donald S. Sanford, "The Cheaters" (12/27/60) marked one of only two episodes--the other being the Poe adaptation "The Premature Burial" (10/2/61)--that were actually introduced with the host's frequently quoted tagline, "As sure as my name is Boris Karloff, this is a Thriller!" Based on a story first published in the November 1947 issue of Weird Tales, it follows a pair of sinister spectacles inscribed with the Latin word veritas (truth) from owner to owner, like the dress tailcoat in the all-star anthology film Tales of Manhattan (1942), and shows how each is brought to grief by their supernatural powers of mind-reading and self-revelation. Henry Daniell had enjoyed one of his best roles opposite Karloff in Robert Wise's The Body Snatcher (1945), and appears in the prologue as sorceror-scientist Dirk Van Prinn (alluded to only briefly by Bloch), who invents the yellow-lensed "cheaters," tries them on in front of a mirror and then, overcome with terror at what he sees, hangs himself.

Years later, junkman Joe Henshaw (Paul Newlan) buys the contents of the house, and in a secret compartment of Van Prinn's desk he finds the spectacles, which reveal his wife, Maggie (Linda Watkins), and his young helper, Charlie (Ed Nelson), as "cheaters" who plan to kill him, so he bludgeons them both before a policeman (John Mitchum) guns him down. Two-time Oscar nominee Mildred Dunnock, who had appeared in Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry (1955), is Miriam Olcott, an elderly kleptomaniac who buys the glasses at a demolition sale of Joe's inventory and learns that her nephew, Edward Dean (Jack Weston), and Dr. Clarence Kramer (Dayton Lummis) are plotting to murder her for her inheritance. After she stabs Kramer with a hatpin and dies in an accidental fire, the nouveau riche Dean dresses as Ben Franklin and dons the spectacles for a costume party, at which he denounces a "cheater" during a poker game and is killed in the mêlée by writer Sebastian Grimm (Harry Townes), who pockets the glasses and then smashes them after repeating Van Prinn's error.

Bloch's "The Hungry House," published in Imagination in April 1950, was adapted by another Twilight Zone veteran, writer-director Douglas Heyes, as "The Hungry Glass" (1/3/61), which Warren identifies along with "The Cheaters" as "two of the strongest horror entries," airing consecutively after a string of mediocre episodes, primarily crime dramas. "To this day," he writes, "'The Cheaters' is considered by some to be the high-point of television horror; 'The Hungry Glass'--which [fellow Thriller historian] Jay Allen Sanford considered the 'turnaround' episode, establishing the show's district [sic] image--featured a strong performance by a young William Shatner." Shatner later made his only other Thriller appearance in Bloch's first-season finale, "The Grim Reaper," and coincidentally, he also starred in a pair of Matheson-scripted Twilight Zone episodes, "Nick of Time" (11/18/60) and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (10/11/63), before landing the role of Captain James Tiberius Kirk on Star Trek, another series to which both Bloch and Matheson contributed.

Donna Douglas, later the delectable Elly May Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies, plays lovely Laura Bellman in the prologue, and yet when a knock at the door interrupts her preening before multiple mirrors in her New England home, it is an old hag (Ottola Nesmith) who answers it and begs, "Leave me alone, can't you? Leave me alone with my mirrors." Years later, Gil Thrasher (Shatner) and his wife Marcia (played by the director's own wife, Joanna Heyes) buy the old Bellman place, and while waiting for the realtor, Adam Talmadge (Russell Johnson), and his wife Liz (Elizabeth Allen) to arrive, they learn from the crusty locals that the house now contains no mirrors, and "comes fully equipped with visitors." Laughing off the rumors and the absence of mirrors, attributed by Adam to several accidents involving broken glass, they attempt to settle in despite a series of unnerving incidents in which shadowy figures are glimpsed in reflective surfaces, until Marcia finds the missing mirrors--which reflect her like a bug's-eye view from The Fly (1958)--locked up in the attic.

Interestingly, Shatner's fine performance contains echoes of both of his Twilight Zone episodes: like businessman Bob Wilson in "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," the shell-shocked Korean War vet Gil begins to doubt his sanity, and his bantering relationship with Marcia, which becomes strained as the terror encroaches, recalls the newlyweds in "Nick of Time." A photographer, Gil captures the image of a little girl on one of his negatives, and when pressed, Adam reveals that the disappearance of young Mary Lou Dempster was yet another tragedy chalked up by the locals to the crazed Laura Bellman, who supposedly lived on in her mirrors when they were taken from her and she died by dancing through a windowpane. Hearing screams, Gil races up to the attic and finds Marcia being pulled by ghostly figures into a large mirror, which he smashes with a poker, but sees when Adam subdues him that he has killed her, and while Gil sits in shock with the Talmadges soon after, Marcia's reflection beckons him in a window and he crashes through to his death on the rocks below.

Best known as the Professor on Gilligan's Island, Johnson appeared in several of producer William Alland's genre films, including It Came from Outer Space (1953), This Island Earth (1955), and The Space Children (1958). As he told Alan Warren, "It was a powerful show, and I enjoyed very much working with Douglas [Heyes] and Bill Shatner. I'd worked with Shatner before, a number of times, and he's always a good actor to work with, for me, anyway; I really enjoyed the give and take with Bill. I thought it was a good script, I really did, and Douglas is a good director. I thought the cast was really good: his wife was one of the women in the show, and the other was Elizabeth Allen, who had been one of the poster girls for Jackie Gleason--a good actress. That aired, as a matter of fact, on Thanksgiving night one particular year when everybody was home watching television, and everybody was home in Hollywood, too. So the next day my agent called me and said, 'My God, the phone is ringing off the hook, and I've got more people, more offers...'"

In the meantime, Bloch continued to turn out teleplays for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, starting with the first he based on his own work, "The Changing Heart" (1/3/61), and then adapting both Bryce Walton's "The Greatest Monster of Them All" and Roald Dahl's "The Landlady," published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and The New Yorker, respectively. Airing back-to-back with "The Hungry Glass" the same night, "The Changing Heart" was directed by Robert Florey, who along with Bela Lugosi had been handed Universal's Poe film Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) as a consolation prize when they were pulled off of Frankenstein (1931), and featured Anne Helm, later the co-star of Bloch's movie The Couch. Engineer Dane Ross (Nicholas Pryor) falls for Lisa (Helm), the granddaughter of clockmaker Ulrich Klemm (Abraham Sofaer), but when he is transferred to Seattle the overly protective Klemm forbids them to wed, and Ross returns months later to learn that before succumbing to illness himself, Klemm saved the lovesick girl's life by giving her a clockwork heart.

The most prolific of the directors to work on the Hitchcock series, and the only one to win an Emmy Award thereby (for "The Glass Eye" [10/6/57], starring Shatner), Robert Stevens had more than thirty episodes to his credit, including "The Greatest Monster of Them All" (2/14/61), and also worked on The Twilight Zone, but directed only a few films. As low-budget producer Hal Bellew (Sam Jaffe of Gunga Din [1939] fame) seeks a subject for his next monster movie, his writer, Fred Logan (William Redfield), suggests that they eschew the giant insects then in vogue in favor of a comeback vehicle for retired horror star Ernst von Kroft (Richard Hale), billed in the 1930s as "The Greatest Monster of Them All." But when the film opens, the star is shocked to learn that director Morty Lenton (Robert H. Harris, who had ironically starred in AIP's How to Make a Monster [1958]) has dubbed him with a Bugs Bunny soundalike, and Fred races to the set just before the vengeful von Kroft, who has killed Morty in a simulated vampire attack, leaps to his own death from a catwalk.

Airing a week later, "The Landlady" (2/21/61) was directed by Austrian actor Paul Henreid, immortalized as Victor Laszlo in Casablanca (1942), and featured former child star Dean Stockwell, celebrated for the title role in Joseph Losey's antiwar fable The Boy with Green Hair (1948), as bank clerk Billy Weaver, newly arrived in an English provincial town. An Academy Award nominee for The Little Foxes (1941) who had also played the mother in Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Patricia Collinge is the eponymous landlady, who says that she is very particular about the young men she takes in, and when Billy sees the names of her two other unseen lodgers in the register, he finds them both naggingly familiar. Plying him with tea, the landlady tells Billy that it will soon be time to go upstairs and meet the others, and after wondering whether he hadn't read that one of them had disappeared, he compliments her on the incredibly realistic stuffed animals in her parlor and then sinks into paralysis, clearly poisoned and poised to become the next addition to her macabre collection.

Undoubtedly Bloch's best-known story, "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper" has been oft anthologized and dramatized in various media since it was first published in Weird Tales in July of 1943, and depicts an ageless Ripper who maintains his youth by committing regularly recurring series of six identical murders as blood sacrifices to the Lovecraftian "dark gods." Barré Lyndon was eminently qualified to adapt this story for Thriller, having written The Man in Half Moon Street, a stageplay about an elderly physician kept youthful with periodic glandular transplants, and although remade by Hammer as The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959), it was first filmed by Ralph Murphy for Paramount under its original title in 1944. That same year, Lyndon scripted the psychological thrillers The Lodger and Hangover Square, both directed by none other than John Brahm and starring Laird Cregar; the former was the second sound remake of Hitchcock's 1926 classic, and featured Cregar--fresh from appearing in a CBS radio version of Bloch's story on The Kate Smith Hour--as the Ripper.

Richard Matheson related in an interview with the author (published in Filmfax #42) that years later, seeking an antagonist for intrepid reporter Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) in his sequel to the record-setting TV-movie The Night Stalker (1/11/72), "I wanted to make the guy in the second one Jack the Ripper, who was still alive and had come over to this country, but I'm a friend of Robert Bloch's, and I called him and asked him if it would disturb him if I did that, and I could sense that he felt that it would, so I didn't do it. Then of course right afterward, on The Sixth Sense, they did the same thing anyway, but at least I didn't do it." Nonetheless, the eponymous killer in The Night Strangler (aka The Time Killer, 1/16/73) has a strikingly similar modus operandi, albeit more scientific than supernatural, and both Matheson's script and Lyndon's teleplay invoke the ageless alchemist the Comte de St. Germain (although Bloch's story does not), while ironically, the very first episode of the subsequent series, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, was "The Ripper" (9/13/74).

Actors Ray Milland and John Williams, who had appeared together in Hitchcock's Dial "M" for Murder (1954), were the director and star, respectively, of "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper" (4/11/61), which opens in Victorian London as the unseen Ripper claims his latest victim, while outside a street singer (J. Pat O'Malley) performs the macabre title tune. In the present, Capt. Pete Jago (Edmon Ryan) listens skeptically as former Scotland Yard pathologist Sir Guy (Williams), a medical liaison in the British Embassy, explains his outré theory regarding the Ripper, complete with chart ("They always have a chart," cracks Jago), to the police department and its consulting psychiatrist, Dr. John Carmody (Donald Woods). Believing the Ripper has an artistic bent, Sir Guy seeks him in the bohemian community to which ex-sculptor Carmody still has ties, but after Hymie Kralik (Adam Williams) proves to be a red herring and his model, Arlene (Nancy Valentine), becomes the next victim, Sir Guy is lured into an alley and stabbed by Carmody, who tells the dying man, "Not John--Jack."

Bloch offered a characteristically humorous account of his own early involvement with Thriller in his autobiography: "While the show was still in the planning stage I was invited to adapt somebody else's story. Quite honestly I remember neither the name nor the plot; all I can recall is that there were no thrills in it, nor any way of injecting them without substituting an entire new story line. As usual, my naïveté surfaced. I complained to the [associate] producer, not knowing at that time he was the man Hitchcock had hired, then fired, as Psycho's screenplay writer. Obviously anyone remotely associated with that particular project was bound to evoke unhappy memories for James P. Cavanaugh [sic]. He hadn't been the one to hire me for this project and wished no one else had either, but was now stuck with my services. Obviously he was also stuck with a show he didn't understand; if you asked him what it was about, he'd tell you it was about an hour. Since Cavanaugh offered little by way of suggestions or cooperation, I took my complaint to a higher court."

That "higher court" was the studio's story editor, to whom he argued, "The ineptitude of the Thriller producer seemed bad enough, but how could a show hope to succeed by putting material on the screen which by rights ought to be put in a shredder? Whoever was responsible for selecting this story should have been a candidate for retroactive abortion. To these and other sentiments the lady heartily agreed, and it wasn't until several months later that I discovered she was the person who had picked that particular story for the program. By that time it didn't matter; she was no longer the studio story editor and Mr. Cavanaugh was no longer the Thriller producer. Relieved of command, he had fired a parting volley of anathema via the pages of TV Guide, and made it appear the retreat was of his own choosing. Voluntary or involuntary, his departure was a fortunate one, both for the show and for me. The inappropriate story was tossed out, but I wasn't tossed along with it. Instead I found myself adapting one of my own published tales, 'The Devil's Ticket.'"

"The Devil's Ticket" (4/18/61), which became the next episode of Thriller after "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper," starred none other than Macdonald Carey, who also appeared in Hammer's The Damned (aka These Are the Damned) that year, and for whom Bloch had written those half-dozen Lock-Up teleplays when he started in television, "and yet for some inexplicable reason the two of us weren't ever in the same place at the same time," he related. Then, "a period of thirty years went by. And one day as I sat signing copies of my latest novel in a Westwood bookshop, in walked Macdonald Carey. And presented me with a copy of his third book of poetry! It was a joyful reunion for two people who had never met." Directed by Jules Bricken, a veteran of two previous Thriller episodes and a contributor to the Hitchcock series who later produced John Frankenheimer's The Train (1964), the episode was faithfully adapted by Bloch from his own short story, which had originally been published in the September 1944 issue of Weird Tales.

Robert Cornthwaite, the ill-advised scientist from The Thing (1951), appears in the prologue as pawnbroker Spengler, who has sold his soul, and by the time impoverished artist Hector Vane (Carey) arrives there to pawn one of his paintings, the Devil (John Emery) has claimed the screaming Spengler in a cloud of smoke and is now running the shop by himself. Vane pawns his soul in exchange for fame and riches, agreeing in return to paint a picture for the Devil, who has him sign a contract and gives him a ticket redeemable at sundown in ninety days, yet when the suddenly successful Vane comes to offer him a landscape the Devil refuses, insisting on a portrait that will capture--and allow him to claim--the model's soul. The unfaithful artist paints a portrait of his wife, Marie (Joan Tetzel), but after his jealous mistress, Nadja (Patricia Medina), unwittingly slashes it, Vane repents and renders the Devil instead; believing he now has the upper hand, he returns at the appointed hour, only to learn as the Devil demands his ticket that it was in the pocket of an old overcoat burned by Marie.

Bloch's teleplay, the music of Morton Stevens (who along with future Oscar winner Jerry Goldsmith scored forty-two of the sixty-seven Thriller episodes, including all seven of Bloch's), and Carey's performance are all superb, especially the mixed emotions on Vane's face as he paints Marie's portrait, believing that he is dooming her to eternal damnation while at the same time rekindling much of the love that had been lost between them. Shortly before his death in 1994, Carey told Warren, "I thought ["The Devil's Ticket"] was one of the best things I ever did. I'm very proud of it....It's too bad they can't bring [Thriller] back. It's a hell of a good show. They don't make them like that any more! Everybody is good in it--it's done impeccably, it's written well, it's produced well. It should be revived, but I don't know how you would do it." Emery, who appeared in Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), was Tallulah Bankhead's only husband, while Medina, also seen on Thriller in "The Premature Burial," was married to Joseph Cotten from 1960 until the actor's death in 1994.

As with the Hitchcock series, Bloch enjoyed a warm relationship with the staff, noting in his autobiography, "The new producer was William Frye, and he was a joy to work with. The same can be said for associate producer Douglas Benton and story editor Jo Swerling. Together with a lady of title named Rita who served as secretary and general factotum, the production unit took over what had once been a schoolhouse for the juvenile delinquents appearing in Universal's films. We seemed to hit it off well together, and during the following two seasons I wrote seven shows for them and had four [sic] additional stories of mine adapted by other writers when I wasn't available to script them myself. This, together with the teleplays I did for Hitchcock and the theatrical film projects, kept me from running down to MGM. As a result I never committed myself to Twilight Zone, which was securely in the hands of Rod Serling and the Matheson Mafia--Beaumont, [William F.] Nolan [whose teleplay "Dreamfight" was never produced], Johnson and other friends.

"Universal was closer to where I lived and Thriller offered a close approximation of ideal working conditions. For one thing, there was a wider choice of material than other shows allowed: Hitchcock would use nothing supernatural or science-fictional, while Twilight Zone used nothing else. On Thriller I had the opportunity to vary my work, just as I did for publication purposes. In a number of instances my scripts were shot from first draft. Whatever rewriting seemed necessary was the result of mutual discussion and decision. Although I didn't sit in on the editing, I did enjoy a privilege which hadn't been offered to me by any other show I worked on: an invitation to attend the first cast rehearsal sessions. These were eye-openers to me....So were the lunches I shared with some of the show's directors. The truly multitalented Ida Lupino [whose episodes included "Guillotine," but none of Bloch's] told me ghost stories based on personal experience and surprised me by rattling the family skeleton of one of my childhood favorites, her late uncle Lupino Lane."

Bloch's only collaboration with Brahm on Thriller, "A Good Imagination" (5/2/61), also marked one of the most dramatic retoolings in both the tone and content of its original source material, a story by Bloch that first appeared in the January 1956 issue of Suspect, and ironically resulted in an episode that would not have been out of place chez Hitchcock. In the story, Logan is a mild-mannered man (neither his first name nor his profession is ever specified) with a literary bent, who looks to Edgar Allan Poe for inspiration while seeking revenge on his wife, Louise, and her lover, George Parker, the handyman who tends to more than just their summer house while Logan is at his business in town during the weekdays. Asking George to wall up an opening in the cellar with quick-drying cement, he then tells the terrified man that he has just suffocated a bound and gagged Louise, and after making sure the police subsequently see her alive, which will provide him with an alibi and send George to a madhouse, Logan tears open the wall and consigns Louise to the exact fate he described.

As filmed, however, Bloch's grim original becomes merely the final act in a macabre comedy, with Edward Andrews in a characteristically zesty performance as Frank Logan, a dealer in rare books who uses his "good imagination" and literary inspirations to rid himself of not only his wife's two lovers but also anyone who might be able to bring him to justice. His first victim, Randy Hagen (William Allyn), is killed with an antique battle-ax taken from his own wall in a simulated burglary, and when Louise (Patricia Barry) tells her brother, Arnold Chase (Britt Lomond), that she suspects Logan, allegedly attending a book dealer's convention in Philadelphia at the time, Arnold hires a private eye, Joe Thorp (Ken Lynch). Logan then disposes of both Thorp, who tries to blackmail him after cracking his alibi, and Arnold with a bottle of poisoned liquor, but in a newly ironic twist ending, once Logan has walled up Louise, the Sheriff (Jim Bannon) arrives with George (Ed Nelson, echoing his obnoxious "other man" role in "The Cheaters"), hoping a look at her will snap him out of it.

Meanwhile, back at the Hitchcock ranch, Bloch adapted "The Gloating Place" (5/16/61) from his own short story, which was published in 1959 in Rogue, a Playboy wannabe that employed such friends and fellow writers as Harlan Ellison and Frank M. Robinson (see OUTRÉ #19), for which he also wrote a monthly column, "Basic Bloch." Susan Harper (Susan Harrison), an unpopular student at Shamley High School--playfully named after Hitchcock's own production company--decides to "make herself important" by fabricating a story about a man in a mask and gloves who tries to attack her in the park, an account which is dutifully investigated by the somewhat skeptical Lt. Palmer (Henry Brandt). Bumped from the headlines by a climbing accident that kills two fellow students, she renews interest in her story by strangling her romantic rival, Marjorie Stone (Marta Kristen, the future Judy Robinson on Lost in Space), only to have her father's fears of a copycat criminal borne out when she goes to her "gloating place" in the park and is killed by a masked man.

Harrison subsequently appeared as the Ballerina in the classic Twilight Zone episode "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" (12/22/61), and is the mother of Darva Conger, who in February 2000 briefly became the ill-fated bride selected by comedian Rick Rockwell on the notorious, headline-making Fox fiasco Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? Director Alan Crosland, Jr., had an equally interesting family history: a stage and silent film veteran, his father and namesake had directed both the first feature with synchronized music, Don Juan (1926), and the first talkie, The Jazz Singer (1927), for Warner Brothers before dying in a car crash in 1936, while his mother was silent star Elaine Hammerstein. Before beginning his prolific television career, which also included episodes of The Twilight Zone as well as Men into Space, The Outer Limits, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and The Sixth Sense, Crosland had been a Hollywood editor since the mid-1940s, and his final credits in that capacity included one of Harrison's few feature films, Sweet Smell of Success (1957).

Herschel Daugherty directed Bloch's next four Thriller teleplays, starting with "The Grim Reaper" (6/13/61), starring a veritable "who's who" of previous Bloch-based episodes: Shatner and Elizabeth Allen from "The Hungry Glass," Daniell and Paul Newlan from "The Cheaters," and Robert Cornthwaite from "The Devil's Ticket." Bloch told Alan Warren that when he loosely adapted Harold Lawlor's short story "The Black Madonna," which was first published in the May 1947 issue of Weird Tales, "'The Grim Reaper' (in the short story, it's a Madonna portrait that sheds tears) was, as you say, just a taking-off point for what ended up as my teleplay. Somehow the original concept didn't fit my image of what a Thriller episode should be, so I replaced the sad Madonna and her sighs with [a portrait of] the Grim Reaper and his [blood-dripping] scythe. And to anyone who affects to sneer at the pun, let me say that this is exactly how I got the idea--by word (or in this case, sound) association. I'm susceptible to influence from rhyme or assonance, and think this is true of most writers."

Once again, Daniell appears in the prologue, this time as Pierre Radin, who in 1848 finds that his son Henri has hanged himself just after completing the titular canvas; a century later, Paul Graves (Shatner) warns its latest owner, his Aunt Beatrice (Natalie Schafer of Gilligan's Island fame), that the painting bleeds before each owner meets a violent death. An eccentric, publicity-hungry mystery writer, Bea laughs off the curse, as does her fifth husband, television actor Gerald Keller (Scott Merrill), from whom Paul eagerly solicits an autograph, although Gerald has eyes for her secretary, Dorothy Linden (Allen), who repels his advances, and soon the alcoholic Aunt Bea is found dead at the bottom of the staircase. Sgt. Bernstein (Newlan) deems her death accidental, yet Dorothy suspects Gerald, especially when Bea's lawyer, Phillips (Cornthwaite), reveals that he inherits her entire estate, but the real culprit is Paul, who poisons Gerald after duping him into "autographing" his own suicide note and will inherit as Bea's only living relative, only to fall victim to the curse himself.

From "The Weird Tailor" (10/16/61) on, Bloch adapted his own material on Thriller, in this case a story published in Weird Tales in July 1950, and according to Alan Warren, he "expanded the story line and added characters, including Nicolai and Madame Roberti (and also worked in his own forbidden volume De Vermis Mysteriis [Mysteries of the Worm])." Gary Clarke, who had played the teenage werewolf (replacing Michael Landon from AIP's eponymous 1957 film) opposite Robert H. Harris in How to Make a Monster, appears in the prologue as the drunken young Arthur Smith, who sets the story in motion when he literally stumbles into a black magic ritual performed by his father (George Macready) and is killed. Seeking to bring him back, the wealthy Smith visits a blind fortune teller, Madame Roberti (Iphigenie Castiglioni), and in turn is sent to Nicolai (Abraham Sofaer), a dealer in used cars under the sobriquet of "Honest Abe," who for a million dollars sells Smith one of only three remaining copies of De Vermis Mysteriis, which contains the sorcerous spell he will require.

Character actor Henry Jones, whose many memorable film roles include the sarcastic coroner in Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), plays the titular tailor, Erik Borg, who is hounded by creditors and abusive to his neglected wife, Anna (Sondra Kerr), and to whom Smith offers $500--on delivery--to make a suit using a strange, colorless fabric and precise instructions. While he works by hand, only at certain specified dates and times, the pathetic Anna turns to a tailor's dummy with a cracked head, which she has dubbed Hans (embodied by an unbilled mime, Dikki Lerner), as her only friend, but by the time Borg brings him the suit, Smith has exhausted all his wealth in his efforts to revive Arthur, whose frozen body Borg discovers. Believing Smith is a murderer, the terrified tailor stabs him when he tries to take the suit by force and orders Anna to burn it before he goes out and gets drunk, returning to find that she has placed it on Hans instead, and as Borg attacks Anna, who plans to go to the police, Hans comes to life and kills him, telling Anna, "From now on, just you and I will be together."

A decade later, Bloch revamped the same story as a segment of Roy Ward Baker's Asylum, one of three anthology films he scripted for Amicus, each based on a quartet of his published works and beginning with Torture Garden, directed by Baker's fellow Hammer veteran, Academy Award-winning cinematographer Freddie Francis. The other segments, also based on stories from Weird Tales, included "Frozen Fear," with Richard Todd as an adulterer who chops up his wife, only to be killed by the neatly wrapped portions of her frozen body, and "Lucy Comes to Stay," a precursor to Psycho in which the murderous Lucy (Britt Ekland) is revealed as a figment of Charlotte Rampling's imagination. Here allotted less than half the running time of a Thriller episode for "The Weird Tailor," Bloch removed the elements he had hitherto added and reduced the tale to its essentials, with Peter Cushing--himself recently bereft of his beloved wife, Helen--as Mr. Smith and Barry Morse, best known for such series as The Fugitive and Space: 1999, as Bruno, the tailor.

Oscar Homolka, an Academy Award nominee whose films ranged from Hitchcock's Sabotage (1936) to William Castle's Mr. Sardonicus (1961) and whose wife, Joan Tetzel, had appeared in "The Devil's Ticket," was the star of the memorable episode "Waxworks" (1/8/62), adapted by Bloch from a story published in the January 1939 issue of Weird Tales. Pierre Jacquelin (Homolka) is the proprietor of a waxworks depicting "fifty of the world's most diabolical murderers," where a young art student named Irene (Amy Fields) apparently falls victim to the figure of an executed killer, as does Sgt. Dane (Alan Baxter) when he begins to take a romantic interest in Pierre's niece and assistant, Annette (Antoinette Bower). As with Sir Guy and the Ripper, Col. Andre Bertroux (Martin Kosleck) has followed a trail of waxwork-related deaths for years, and only after he and Det. Mike Hudson (future Tarzan Ron Ely) also die does Lt. Bailey (Booth Colman) learn that the disguised Pierre killed for fresh blood to animate Annette, molded over the body of his wife, an executed murderess.

Like "The Weird Tailor," this episode was subsequently remade with Peter Cushing as a segment of an Amicus anthology film, The House That Dripped Blood, directed by Peter Duffell and adapted by Bloch from four of his published short stories, and once again the feature-film version was, of necessity, significantly shorter than its televised counterpart. Here, however, they are substantially different, with the former hewing much closer to his original story, as retired stockbroker Phillip Grayson (Cushing) becomes obsessed with the hauntingly familiar figure of Salome holding the head of John the Baptist, which Jacquelin (Wolfe Morris) explains was modeled after his wife, executed for murdering his best friend. Neville Rogers (Joss Ackland), an old friend and former romantic rival, visits Grayson and together they go to the waxworks, where Salome has the same effect on Rogers; ultimately, each man winds up with his head on the platter--as Bertroux did in the story--courtesy of Jacquelin, who had framed his adulterous wife and now jealously disposes of her "admirers."

However, Duffell told Mark A. Miller, author of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing and Horror Cinema, that he had substantially rewritten this segment, which as scripted by Bloch was closer to his Thriller teleplay: "the 'Waxworks' story was basically nothing more than a...contrivance to get Peter Cushing's head on a plate and this gave me the greatest problems. I decided to try and give the story a little resonance on the strictly human level by building up the loneliness of the character, taking refuge from the disappointments of life in his books, music and memories, and by introducing the theme of the unhappy love for the unattainable dead girl [whom Rogers had also loved]." In a letter to Miller, Bloch countered, "I didn't care for the improvements (?) on 'Waxworks'--with the emphasis on the Peter Cushing's [sic] character's yearning for his lost love and the subordination of the role of the waxworks proprietor. The version I wrote for Thriller... was--I think--much stronger. Oscar Homolka was memorable as the waxworks keeper."

The Amicus "Waxworks" was bookended by "Method for Murder" (published in Fury in 1962), in which writer Denholm Elliott believes his fictive strangler has come to life, and "Sweets to the Sweet" (Weird Tales, March 1947), with Christopher Lee as a cold, neglectful father whose daughter (Chloe Franks) makes a voodoo doll of him and throws it into the fire. Interestingly, when writing the last and best-known segment, "The Cloak," Bloch apparently drew from his Hitchcock teleplay "The Greatest Monster of Them All" as well as his story, published in Unknown in May of 1939, in which the ill-fated Stephen Henderson purchases a "genuine" vampire cloak for a Halloween party in the sinister shop of an unnamed costumer. The movie's Paul Henderson (Jon Pertwee) is a horror star who wants realism in the cheap films he is forced to make, echoing Ernst von Kroft in the earlier script, and after buying the cloak from Theo Von Hartmann (Geoffrey Bayldon, who also appeared in Asylum), he comes to believe it is turning him into a vampire and even bites his co-star, Carla (Ingrid Pitt).

As Bloch later recounted in his autobiography, "Amicus Films, encouraged by the comparative success of Torture Garden [the misleading title of which had been "ripped off" from Octave Mirbeau by the studio, much to Bloch's embarrassment], sent along another wraparound premise for an anthology offering, and I incorporated four of my stories into The House That Dripped Blood. Needless to say, it was again producer Max [J.] Rosenberg who gave the title a transfusion. When it came to actual on-screen blood, the film was positively anemic. But due credit must be given to the director for deftly turning the final segment into a send-up of my vampire story, 'The Cloak,' and thereby improving it a hundred percent." The voluptuous and vivacious Pitt starred in Hammer's The Vampire Lovers and Countess Dracula that same year, and is perfectly cast as Carla, who later dons the cloak and sprouts fangs herself, telling the terrified Paul before she bites him, "We loved your films so much, we wanted you to become one of us forever. Welcome to the club!"

Himself an actor, John Newland directed "Bad Actor" (1/9/62), an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents adapted by Bloch from a story by Max Franklin, and had served in the same capacity for all ninety-four episodes of ABC's allegedly fact-based supernatural anthology series One Step Beyond (aka Alcoa Presents, 1959-61), which he also hosted. Airing the night after "Waxworks," it starred Robert Duvall in one of his first roles--more than a year before his Twilight Zone episode "Miniature" (2/21/63)--as alcoholic actor Bart Collins, who gets carried away during an altercation with Jerry Lane (Charles Robinson), his rival for both a plum upcoming role and the affections of Marjorie Rogers (Carole Eastman). Like the adulterous actor getting too far into character in "Method for Murder," he strangles Jerry, dissolving the body with acid, but when Lt. Gunderson (William Schallert) comes to his apartment to question him, Bart's suspicious behavior leads him to discover Jerry's head in the ice bucket, echoing Emlyn Williams's twice-filmed Gothic stageplay, Night Must Fall.

Henry Jones returned in the leading role of undertaker Carl Somers in "'Til Death Do Us Part" (3/12/62), and even more than "A Good Imagination," Bloch's three-page original story, published in the January 1960 issue of Bestseller Mystery, was but the merest acorn from which a more elaborate Thriller teleplay grew, with the story serving as a twist ending. Carl's wife, Abbie (Frances Morris), learns that he has corresponded through a matrimonial bureau with Celia Hooper (Reta Shaw), so he strangles her and heads out West to wed Celia, only to find that she not only is grossly obese but also comes complete with a suspicious brother, Elmer (Philip Ober), and a sister-in-law, Myrtle (Jocelyn Brando, sister of Marlon). Daugherty's droll direction matches the material as Carl blackmails a shady sawbones, Dr. O'Connor (Edgar Buchanan), into giving him some ineffectual poison, then strangles Celia and conceals her in a coffin beneath Myrtle when the latter dies suddenly, but later the Marshal (Jim Davis) says that Elmer may have murdered Myrtle, so he must exhume her...

Many pinpoint Newland's "Pigeons from Hell" (6/6/61), adapted by John Kneubuhl from a story by Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan and Kull (which had been published posthumously in the May 1938 issue of Weird Tales), as not only the finest episode of Thriller but also the single most frightening story ever done on television. Stephen King offered a dissenting opinion in Danse Macabre: "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 [for which Inge was also the script supervisor], was canceled following the furore over an episode starring then rock star Fabian Forte as a psychopathic rapist--the episode ["A Lion Walks Among Us" (12/3/61)] 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' [3/25/62] has never been beaten on TV--and rarely anywhere else--for eerie, mounting horror."

"One day Gordon Molson called to tell me a special screening had been set up for me at his request, over at Twentieth Century-Fox," Bloch wrote in his autobiography. "I arrived at the appointed time and settled down in my seat to view the pilot for a proposed one-hour series called Nightmare. Oddly enough, the pilot turned out to be a dramatization of my short story 'I Kiss Your Shadow.' It [appeared in March 1956 in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction], and reached book publication in my Arkham House collection, Pleasant Dreams. Twentieth Century-Fox had bought the story directly from Derleth, and was under the impression that he owned theatrical rights to everything that Arkham House [which he co-founded] ever published. That was definitely not the case, and Gordon Molson exhibited my original contracts as proof. The studio offered an embarrassed apology and a thousand dollars for the use or misuse of my story. What they offered to Derleth I wasn't told, and he never offered an explanation. Suffice it to say that Nightmare didn't become a series."

Pace King, the Bus Stop episode was actually adapted by Barry Trivers, a prolific if undistinguished screenwriter in the 1930s and '40s, and interpolated the recurring characters of Sheriff Will Mayberry (Rhodes Reason) and D.A. Glenn Wagner (Richard Anderson) into Bloch's tale of Joe Elliot (George Grizzard) and his fiancée, Donna Gibson (Joanne Linville). After the possessive Donna is killed in a car accident with Joe driving, he tells her brother, Doug (Alfred Ryder), that her "shadow" has begun visiting him in the cottage where they were to live, and although he makes some progress with a psychiatrist, Dr. Barton (Stefan Schnabel), the haunted young man soon loses his job and begs Doug, "Make her stay dead!" When Barton plunges to his death from his office window, Doug deduces that Joe pushed him because he got too close to the truth, and after admitting that he felt smothered and killed Donna with a wrench, Joe runs to the cemetery and is found dead, slumped over her casket (which, in the story, also contains a newborn infant apparently conceived after death).

Coincidentally, Newland also directed that standout episode, as well as Bloch's final Thriller teleplay, "Man of Mystery" (4/2/62), but while it is credited as "based on his story," Bloch told Alan Warren, "'Man of Mystery' was written at a time when eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes was very much in the news. I'd already written a short story ["Show Biz," published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 1959] predicting that actors might be chosen and groomed as political leaders (which, of course, came true!) but then I got to wondering why the same setup couldn't apply to financial tycoons. Maybe they too might be figureheads. So instead of writing another short story, I chose to present this one as a teleplay. And that's how 'Man of Mystery' was born." In the prologue, public relations man Harry Laxer (William Phipps) finishes an exposé of his secretive former employer, the "international playboy and financier" Joel Stone, but before Laxer can deliver it to the publisher, he and the manuscript of Man of Mystery are both burned by an unseen assailant.

Later seen in Hitchcock's Topaz (1969), John van Dreelen is Stone, whose "faithful shadow" is the deaf-mute Lucas (Walter Burke), and who buys a nightclub run by Rudy (Ken Lynch of "A Good Imagination"), hoping to make singer Sherry Smith (Mary Tyler Moore, then in her first season as Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show) his next conquest. Small-time comic Lou Waters (William Windom), who loves and fears for Sherry, visits Jill Naylor (Mercedes Shirley), hoping that Stone's erstwhile inamorata can talk some sense into her, but Jill too is killed before she can blow the whistle on Stone, and the magnate invites Sherry to fly to Mexico with him after picking up a "retirement fund" at his hunting lodge. There he is killed by Lucas, who suddenly speaks to reveal that he is Joel Stone, having hired a charming and attractive actor to front for him, and when Lou breaks in to confront him he observes, "we three are all that's left that know the secret"; soon, Lucas and "Harlan Croft" (Lou) are running the company, after Sherry reportedly killed Stone and then herself.

Like the previous season's "The Gloating Place," Bloch's "The Big Kick" (6/19/62) was also directed for Alfred Hitchcock Presents by Alan Crosland, Jr., and based on another of his stories published in Rogue in 1959, which served as a not-too-subtle satire on the so-called "beat generation," with its hip dialogue and its free-living and -loving protagonists. Two beatniks, Mitch and Judy, live only for the sexual thrills they call "the big kick," until he needs money to go to the Coast and join a combo, so he suggests that Judy get friendly with a well-off "square" named Kenny, but when the diamond bracelet he gives her turns out to be stolen and Mitch is arrested, Judy learns that Kenny gets his "big kick" with a knife. The Hitchcock version--Bloch's last to be broadcast in the half-hour format--stuck to the story faithfully, and featured Anne Helm (who had played Lisa in "The Changing Heart") as Judy Baker, minor sagebrush star Brian Hutton as Mitch, and Wayne Rogers, best known as Capt. John F.X. (Trapper John) McIntire on the first three seasons of M*A*S*H, as Ken.

Originally scheduled as Hitchcock's seventh-season opener on October 3, 1961, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" is perhaps the most memorable entry in the television career of Polish director Josef Leytes (variously credited as Joseph Leytes, Joseph Lejtes, or Józef Lejtes), a filmmaker in his native country prior to World War II and in Israel immediately afterwards. An Academy Award nominee for Shane (1953) and the star of "Pigeons from Hell," Brandon De Wilde plays Hugo, a retarded runaway orphan who is taken in by the kindly carnival magician Victor Sadini (David J. Stewart), and quickly comes to revere Sadini's tart-tongued wife and assistant, Irene (British bombshell Diana Dors), whom Hugo regards as an angel. The less-than-angelic Irene is carrying on with the high-wire artist, George (Larry Kert), and persuades Hugo that the Satanic-looking Sadini really is the Devil, but after stabbing him the well-meaning youth accidentally knocks Irene unconscious and, believing that Sadini's wand has given him "the Power," decides to prove it by sawing her in half, with gruesome results.

Bloch's first teleplay for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, "Annabel" (11/1/62) reunited Dean Stockwell and director Paul Henreid from "The Landlady," as well as featuring a return engagement by Henry Brandt of "The Gloating Place," and like Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951), it was also based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith, The Sweet Sickness. Chemist David Kelsey (Stockwell) refuses to accept that his relationship with Annabel (Susan Oliver) is over now that she has married Gerald Delaney (Brandt), and posing as "William Newmaster" he buys a house in the country as a surprise for her, where David's Manhattan roommate, Wes Carmichael (Gary Cockrell), believes he is visiting his father on weekends. Learning the address from David's co-worker, Linda (Kathleen Nolan), Gerald warns him at gunpoint to stop pestering Annabel, but "Newmaster" kills him, telling the Sheriff (Bert Remsen) that he was a drunken intruder, and then lures Annabel there, strangling her when she has learned the truth so that they may enjoy their beautiful house together forever.

"A Home Away from Home" (9/27/63) was Bloch's last teleplay for the Hitchcock series to be based on his own work, and the only one directed by Daugherty, with Ray Milland now moving in front of the camera. As Bloch wrote in his autobiography, "After the long film stints I spent a few days soaking in the mineral baths of Desert Hot Springs. It must have been during the first of those autobaptismal occasions that I came up with a short story which won a prize upon appearing in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine [in 1961]. Having contributed to quite a few of Hitch's half-hour shows I continued the practice now that the program had expanded to hour length. After adapting Patricia Highsmith's Annabel [sic] for the longer format I did the same for my prize-winning yarn which they purchased for that purpose. This wasn't an easy task because the published story...was another of my many variants on old buddy Eddie Poe's lunatics-take-over-the-asylum theme [from "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether"], and my version was only a few pages long."

The wife of filmmaker Sydney Pollack, Claire Griswold appeared with Robert Duvall in "Miniature" and here stars as Natalie Rivers, who arrives from Australia at the Norton Sanatorium, little dreaming that Dr. Howard Fenwick (Milland), himself a patient, has just strangled her uncle and only relative, Dr. Norton (Ben Wright), whom she has never met. Unlike the reader, the viewer knows her predicament at the outset as Fenwick impersonates Norton, saying, "Give [a mental patient] a role to play in real life and he'll accept the challenge," and puts his own book Permissive Therapy into practice, presenting Miss Gibson (Virginia Gregg), Martha (Connie Gilchrist), and Nicky Long (Jack Searl) as his staff. Discovering Norton's body in the dumbwaiter and his assistant, Andrew (Peter Leeds), in a cell upstairs, Natalie learns the truth at last and, accompanied by a beautiful Bernard Herrmann score, escapes her literary counterpart's grim fate when "Inspector" Roberts (Brendan Dillan) takes his assigned role too seriously and alerts his colleagues in the police.

"When Thriller left the air in July 1962," Warren writes, "the most immediate and obvious beneficiary was the venerable Alfred Hitchcock Presents. This show promptly moved from NBC to CBS, expanded to a full 60 minutes, and was retitled The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Its stories became noticeably more macabre, and the show began to employ many Thriller directors, including John Brahm and John Newland. Ironically, the show that Thriller had once patterned itself after now seemed like an imitation. Many episodes were notable ventures into the supernatural virtually indistinguishable from Thriller. 'The Sign of Satan,' scripted by Robert Bloch and based on his story 'Return to the Sabbath' [Weird Tales, July 1938], featured Christopher Lee as a European horror star reluctant to make his American debut because of a cult bent on killing him. It was an atmospheric episode with a memorably creepy denouement." In fact, Brahm's work on the Hitchcock series predated Thriller, and that story, like "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper," was adapted by Barré Lyndon.

"The Sign of Satan" (5/8/64) was directed by Robert Douglas, an English actor who had himself appeared on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and in a notable case of life imitating art, his countryman Lee was now making his own American debut. Soon after arriving in Hollywood, Lee recalled in his memoir Tall, Dark and Gruesome, "the phone rang and I heard an English voice I knew, the actor Bob Douglas who was often a heavy in remakes in the Prisoner of Zenda class. I was surprised. The last I'd seen of him was golfing at Sunningdale years before. He said we'd be seeing a lot of each other in the next two weeks. I was even more surprised. Then he explained, 'I'm directing the film.' 'Isn't Alfred Hitchcock directing it?' I asked. 'Good heavens, no!' laughed Bob, as if I'd suggested Winnie-the-Pooh or the Flying Dutchman would be in charge. 'He's only the host. He tops and tails. He never directs [sic]. He has a staff of directors, and I'm one.' After the immediate pang, I thought this would be fine, and never had cause to reverse my opinion.

"One day...as I was cycling from the stage to the commissary a large black Cadillac went by, and behind its tinted glass I could see Hitchcock, looking neither left nor right. He was real. That was all I needed to know. Altogether, that was a good day," added Lee, already established as the reigning king of contemporary horror stars via his Hammer films. Actress Kitty (Gia Scala), director Max Rubini (Gilbert Green), assistant Ed Walsh (Adam Roarke), and p.r. man Dave Connor (Myron Healey) view footage from an obscure Austrian film financed by a cult, in which former stage actor Karl Jorla (Lee) is resurrected by devil worshippers, installed as their arch-priest, and then killed once again by his own acolytes. An Academy Award nominee for The Country Girl (1954), who later shot Hitchcock's Torn Curtain (1966), John F. Warren provides suitably atmospheric photography for these scenes, reminiscent of those in Lee's memorable British chiller City of the Dead (aka Horror Hotel, 1960), which helps to offset the overly familiar, uncredited stock score.

Both Jorla and his director, Fritz Ohmmen, have been hiding out in Paris since they made the film, which the cult never intended to be seen publicly, and Ohmmen, who sold a pirated copy of it to Dave, warns him to be careful where he shows it for fear of reprisals, but Max, determined to use Jorla in his next horror movie, has him brought to Hollywood. Lee, whose German credits include the title role in Sherlock Holmes und das Halsband des Todes (Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace, 1962), affects an acceptable accent as Jorla, shunning publicity that would reveal his location and insisting that the sign of Satan, soon found branded on Ohmmen's strangled body in a Paris attic, is genuine and ubiquitous. Jorla vanishes after an attempt on his life, yet reappears when Max tries to shoot around him and Kitty conjures his character of "Baron Ulmo" (in a slow-motion shot worthy of the great Mario Bava), murmuring an address in Topanga Canyon, but when the negative is developed he is nowhere to be seen, and at the address the police find his body, dead for three days.

Of his unsettling opus "Water's Edge," Bloch noted in his autobiography, "This was a simple, straightforward little story which I thought would be ideal for the new Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. The editor thought otherwise. So did the editors at Ellery Queen and a half-dozen other potential markets. In the end the story saw the light of day--and a very dim light it was, at a penny a word--in Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine [in 1956]. Imagine my surprise when, just a year later, the story was reprinted in a hardcover anthology entitled Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories They Wouldn't Let Me Do on TV. In the years that followed, the story continued to be widely reprinted here and abroad. Eventually it even ended up as a one-hour television episode. Needless to say, the show on which it appeared was Alfred Hitchcock Presents [sic]." Scripted by Alfred Hayes, who shared Oscar nominations for Paisà (1946) and Teresa (1951), "Water's Edge" (10/19/64) was directed by feature-film veteran Bernard Girard, as was Matheson's "Ride the Nightmare" (11/29/62).

Later the sinister husband in Rosemary's Baby (1968) and a three-time Academy Award nominee (once each as director, writer, and supporting actor), John Cassavetes is well cast as convict Rusty Connors, whose cellmate Mike Krause (Rayford Barnes) killed his best friend, Pete, in a payroll heist and waxes rhapsodic about his wife, Helen, a blonde beauty. Just before dying of pneumonia, Mike reveals that the money is still with Pete, whose body was never found, so upon his release Rusty tries to track down the payroll by seeking out Helen, yet as played by fifty-five-year-old Ann Sothern, a fellow nominee for The Whales of August (1987), the fat, frowsy waitress in a small-town diner is hardly what he expected. Backed by a Herrmann score similar to that in Vertigo, he seduces Helen to secure her help, but after finding the money and Pete's skeleton in a rat-infested boathouse they turn on each other, leaving Helen--who had deliberately let herself go in order to camouflage her eventual departure--dead with a boathook in her back and Rusty bound and gagged, awaiting the rats.

John Brahm's only Bloch-related episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, "Final Performance" (1/18/65) was adapted by Clyde Ware, dropping the initial article "the" from Bloch's title, and starred Franchot Tone, an Oscar nominee for Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) who would die of lung cancer in 1968, as crusty old ex-vaudevillian "Rudolph the Great." Best known to genre fans for Count Yorga, Vampire (1970) and The Return of Count Yorga (1971), Roger Perry is Cliff Allen, a television writer flagged down en route to Hollywood by the underaged Rosie (Sharon Farrell), although she denies asking for a ride when he is stopped by the Sheriff (Kelly Thordsen), whereupon Cliff's ailing auto promptly packs it in. While it is fixed he checks into a motel, where Rosie works for the possessive Rudolph and begs Cliff to take her away, but when she fails to make their rendezvous he confronts her in Rudolph's makeshift theater, and after Rosie professes her love for Rudolph and sends Cliff away, we see that "the world's greatest ventriloquist" has turned her into a grisly "dummy."

Best known for Alland's This Island Earth, Hollywood veteran Joseph M. Newman directed "The Second Wife" (4/26/65), which Bloch based on a story by Richard Denning, with June Lockhart, later Marta Kristen's mother on Lost in Space, as mail-order bride Martha Hunter and John Anderson, the used car salesman in Psycho, as her husband, Luke. Finding her new home both literally and figuratively cold, Martha is unnerved to learn that she had a predecessor who died mysteriously while visiting Luke's relatives, and even more so when she finds a coffin-shaped box concealed in the garage and hears her miserly husband digging at all hours in the locked cellar, so she buys a gun to protect herself from him. Martha's fears seem justified when Luke abruptly suggests that they visit his relatives, and demands that she take a look at what he's been working on down in the basement before they go, but after the terrified woman shoots her apparently homicidal husband, she descends into the cellar at last and finds the brand-new furnace that Luke intended as a wedding present.

The final episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, "Off Season" (5/10/65), was adapted by Bloch from a story by Edward Hoch, and marked both a beginning and ending of sorts, as it was among the first directorial credits of William Friedkin, later an Academy Award winner for The French Connection (1971) and a nominee for The Exorcist (1973). "Bill [Friedkin] often says that it was Hitchcock who discovered him, but that was plainly not the case," as Norman Lloyd, who by then had become the show's executive producer, told John McCarty and Brian Kelleher in Alfred Hitchcock Presents. "I hired Bill Friedkin after seeing a documentary he made at a Chicago TV station about a convicted murderer named Crump. Joe Wizan, an agent at MCA [Universal's parent company], brought him to my attention, and I assigned him to direct 'Open [sic] Season,' one of the last Hitchcocks, with John Gavin, our [then] present ambassador to Mexico." Gavin, of course, is best known as Sam Loomis, the lover (and posthumous brother-in-law) of the ill-fated Marion Crane in Psycho.

Here, he plays Johnny Kendall, a big-city cop who loses his job because of his itchy trigger finger and moves with his girlfriend, Sandy (Indus Arthur), to a small resort town, where Sheriff Dade (Tom Drake) hires him as his new deputy, albeit one forbidden to wear a gun and relegated to checking on empty summer homes during their eponymous off-season. Learning that the previous deputy was fired for carrying on with women in one of those homes, Johnny begins to suspect that he is having an affair with Sandy, and after strapping on his prohibited pistol and finding the ex-deputy dallying in the dark, he kills them both, only to discover that the woman was not Sandy but Sheriff Dade's wife, Irma (Dody Heath). Sadly, none of the Bloch-related episodes were among the eighteen that Hitchcock himself directed for his anthology show, and a subsequent attempt at collaboration on a feature film foundered as well after he offered Bloch an open-ended contract to develop a story with him in the mid-1960s, as Stephen Rebello relates in Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho.

"Hitchcock summoned...Bloch to hatch a successor to Psycho. Bloch met Hitchcock to discuss the director's notion to graft elements of the real-life murder cases of seductive British murderers Haigh and Christie of the forties onto an original suspense narrative that might form a long-hoped-for 'prequel' to the classic Shadow of a Doubt...Bloch--by that time the recipient of an 'Edgar' Award from The Mystery Writers of America for Psycho, and a prolific screenwriter--found himself unable to agree to the terms of Hitchcock's contract. The arrangement proposed by Hitchcock meant that Bloch was to be paid only when and if he were to come up with an approach that pleased the director. Bloch moved on. No one dared reject Hitchcock. When the writer's name came across Hitchcock's desk on a short list of writers for a later project, the director wrote next to it: 'Too many pictures for William Castle''--a reference to the director for whom Bloch had written Strait-Jacket, a low-budget shocker featuring Joan Crawford as an apparent axe-murderess," writes Rebello.

Directed by John Rich and adapted by Stephen Kandel from Bloch's story of the same name, "There Was a Little Girl" (4/6/66) was a first-season episode of the groundbreaking show I Spy, in which Bill Cosby became the first black actor on American television ever to star in a dramatic series, playing Alexander Scott opposite Robert Culp as Kelly Robinson. According to the episode guide on I Spy--The Definitive Site, "Scott and Robinson are assigned to play babysitter for the teenage daughter [played by Mary Jane Saunders, who was actually in her early twenties at the time] of an American VIP during her Mexican vacation. Trouble finds them all when she buys a pre-Colombian mask at a gift store originally destined for New York, USA. What is in the mask which would cause such panic and why would the pursuers want to give the girl a painful yet humiliating death?" Bloch also reportedly wrote one or more teleplays for Run for Your Life, another adventure series that ran concurrently with I Spy (1965-68) on the same network, NBC, and starred Ben Gazzara.

Bloch noted in his autobiography that in addition to his other work in 1966, "I also responded to a request from a new television series, Star Trek. Producer Gene Roddenberry, star William Shatner and story editor Dorothy Fontana were already known to me; Dorothy had started in the business as secretary to Sam Peeples some years before. As a matter of fact, Sam had written a second pilot script for Star Trek, though he never contributed any episodes to the series." The late James Goldstone had helmed that second pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before" (9/22/66), and in Cinefantastique's thirtieth anniversary tribute to the series, Robin Brunet wrote, "When the pilot sold, Roddenberry wanted Goldstone to remain 'part of the Star Trek team,' but Goldstone politely declined--a career in feature films was about to take off. Goldstone did return during year one, as a favor to Roddenberry, to guide [Bloch's] 'What Are Little Girls Made Of?' [10/20/66] out of troubled production waters, but doesn't care to elaborate on the nature of the troubles or recall 'a single shooting day of it.'"

Roddenberry's future wife, Majel Barrett, was cast as "Number One," the second in command of the Enterprise, in the show's abortive and unaired first pilot, "The Cage" (later incorporated into the two-part episode "The Menagerie"), and after being displaced by Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) at the network's insistence, she returned as Nurse Christine Chapel. In "What Are Little Girls Made Of?," the crew locates her fiancé, medical archaeologist Roger Korby (Michael Strong), on the frigid planet Exo-III, where he reported finding underground ruins left by its former inhabitants before losing contact five years ago, and giant Ruk (Ted Cassidy) kills the first of the show's ill-fated "red shirts," Matthews (Vince Deadrick) and Rayburn (Budd Albright). Kirk and Chapel are welcomed by Korby, his assistant Dr. Brown (Harry Basch), and the attractive Andrea (former child star Sherry Jackson, the stepdaughter of Twilight Zone director Montgomery Pittman), but when Brown forbids them at gunpoint to contact the ship, he is shot with a phaser by Kirk and revealed to be an android, as is the indigenous Ruk.

Using the records of the "Old Ones," who left Ruk tending their machinery centuries ago, he and Korby built Brown and Andrea, and Korby assures the jealous Chapel that the latter has no emotions before demonstrating the alien technology by creating an android duplicate of Kirk, which interacts with the original by way of a seamless split-screen effect. Kirk had, of course, come face-to-face with himself before when a transporter malfunction divided him into his good and evil selves in Matheson's "The Enemy Within" (10/6/66), but Korby now proposes to grant him effective immortality by transferring his consciousness into the emotionless android, an honor that the flesh-and-blood Kirk is none too eager to accept. Deducing that the Old Ones were killed by their own machines because their emotions were considered illogical and unacceptable, Kirk encourages Ruk to turn on Korby, who is forced to destroy him before being exposed as an android as well; convinced of their inferiority to humans when Andrea mistakenly slays the faux Kirk, he sacrifices them both with a phaser.

Perhaps understandably, Barrett was dismissive of her new character, noting in her commentary for the Sci-Fi Channel's Special Edition of this episode, "I've never been a real aficionado of Nurse Chapel. I figure she was kind of weak and namby-pamby. I mean after all, here she was a doctor, and in order to find a lost fiancé she takes a reduction in rank and pay and signs on board this ship and goes out to find her fiancé. She finds him, he turns out to be an android, now he's not going to do her any good. She immediately signs on board this ship again for another five-year mission, again at a reduction of rank and pay, falls in love with a Vulcan who only comes in heat once every seven years [as revealed in "Amok Time" (9/15/67)]--now, this woman is a loser! This is not the sign of a real strong woman, and I kind of reject women who are that way, I guess, in real life, and perhaps even afterwards, in looking back, maybe that's why I feel that way about her." Barrett played Lwaxana Troi on Star Trek: The Next Generation and also gave voice to the ship's computer.

A former stage and screen actor who had appeared in Joan Harrison's production of Nocturne (1946), Joseph Pevney went on to direct many films for Universal-International during the 1950s, most notably the histrionic Lon Chaney biopic Man of a Thousand Faces (1957), and a baker's dozen episodes of Star Trek, including Bloch's two remaining scripts. "Catspaw" (10/27/67) was the first episode produced during Star Trek's second season, although its broadcast was delayed until just before Halloween, and marked the introduction of the youth-oriented navigator Ens. Pavel Chekov, played by Walter Koenig, who at that time was wearing a wig while his hair grew to its more recognizable Monkees-style length. Emerging from the corpse of crewman Jackson (Jimmy Jones), beamed back on board from a landing party to Pyris VII that included Chief Engineer Scott (James Doohan) and Helmsman Sulu (George Takei), a disembodied voice intones to Kirk and Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy (DeForest Kelley), "There is a curse on your ship. Leave this place or you will all die."

Beaming down to the planet's fog-swept surface with Spock, Kirk and McCoy are again warned away by three witches (Rhodie Cogan, Gail Bonney, and Maryesther Denver), dismissed as illusory by Spock, and enter the castle that is the source of the lifeform readings they are tracing, where they follow a black cat and fall into a dungeon, awakening in chains. Released by entranced "catspaws" Scotty and Sulu, they find themselves in the presence of Korob (Theodore Marcuse), who conjures up items with a "transmuter" wand and converses with the cat, in reality his sensation-seeking colleague Sylvia (Antoinette Bower, also seen in "Waxworks"), and her sympathetic magic seals the Enterprise in an impenetrable force field. The aliens, who also invoke the Old Ones, try to force the captives to reveal their scientific secrets, while Spock theorizes that they have inadvertently tapped into the universal myths of our racial subconscious, and when Sylvia menaces them as the now-giant cat, Kirk destroys the transmuter, banishing the illusions and returning the aliens to their true, dying forms.

Barrett's metamorphosis from Number One to nurse was not the only distaff demotion in Star Trek history. As Sue Uram noted in her Cinefantastique episode guide to the series, "Looking at the chain of command in this episode, there is a question of who was next in line. With Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scott and Sulu on the planet, Uhura should be the next in line. D.C. Fontana once said that, as the script supervisor, she had tried to put Uhura in command of the ship while all the other regulars, except Ensign Chekov, were on the planet Pyris VII...but was not allowed to do so. The producers promoted semi-regular, Lt. DeSalle [Mike Barrier] to the position of Assistant Chief Engineer for the purpose of having him outrank Uhura. Roddenberry did not include a communications officer among the proposed regular characters in the format and Uhura did not appear in either of the pilot episodes." Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) debuted in Sohl's superb "The Corbomite Maneuver" (11/10/66), directed by Joseph Sargent, which was the first episode produced after the second pilot.

Discussing the multi-media longevity of "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper," Bloch wrote in his autobiography, "I have also been obliged to reincarnate the Ripper in everything from an episode of Star Trek to a full-length novel of my own [The Night of the Ripper]. Over the years Jack and I would become blood brothers....'Wolf in the Fold' [12/22/67] was the result of Dorothy Fontana's suggestion that I launch my old friend Jack the Ripper into orbit. She provided considerable assistance in the final draft." In a footnote, Bloch graciously added, "Writing these lines, I suddenly realize that in the hundreds of thousands of words I've read about Star Trek since it became a cult phenomenon, I seldom saw a scriptwriter give credit to Dorothy or another member of the staff, though I know that in some instances the writers taking the bows lent little more than their names to the shooting script." Sohl, in contrast, had his name replaced with the nom de plume of Nathan Butler on "This Side of Paradise" (3/2/67) after Fontana drastically rewrote his original submission, "The Way of the Spores."

Scotty is on therapeutic shore leave with Kirk and McCoy on the hedonistic planet of Argelius, trying to overcome a total resentment toward women since one caused an explosion that threw him against a bulkhead, and after Argelian dancer Kara (Tania Lemani) is killed, Scott--seemingly ill-fated while on terra firma--is found standing over her body with a knife. He remembers nothing, and chief city administrator Hengist (John Fiedler), a native of Rigel IV, investigates to no avail, so the prefect, Jaris (Charles Macauley), plans to have his wife Sybo (Pilar Seurat) use her ancient ancestral gift of Argelian empathic contact to reveal the past, and Kirk has Lt. Karen Tracy (Virginia Aldridge) beam down with a psycho-tricorder. She too is killed while conducting a "twenty-four hour regressive memory check" on Scott, who once again remembers nothing and is the most likely suspect, notwithstanding Kara's jealous fiancé Morla (Charles Dierkop), and Kirk rejects Spock's suggestion that they use the ship's computer to learn the truth, preferring to let the case be resolved by Argelian law.

Before becoming the next victim, Sybo senses "fear, anger, hatred. Anger feeds the flame. Oh, oh, there is evil here, monstrous, terrible evil, consuming hunger, hatred of all that lives, hatred of women, a hunger that never dies. It is strong, overpowering, an ancient terror. It has a name--Boradis, Kesla, Redjac--devouring all life, all light....Redjac!" Agreeing at last to use its technology, Hengist and Jaris beam aboard the Enterprise, where the computer informs them that Redjac (Red Jack) was another name for the Ripper, actually a formless alien entity that subsists on the emotions of others, specifically fear, a mass of energy consisting of a highly cohesive electromagnetic field that can assume physical form. A series of Ripper murders stretches through time and space from Victorian London to Rigel IV, exposing Hengist as the killer, but when subdued he collapses and Redjac takes over the computer, trying to terrorize the crew by threatening all manner of destruction, until driven back into Hengis with an insoluble math problem and dispersed in space with the transporter.

Like Serling before him, Roddenberry was determined when launching Star Trek to use the finest fantasy/SF writers as contributors, and in addition to Ellison and the usual suspects of the "Matheson Mafia" these included Jerome Bixby, whose story "It's a Good Life" became a memorable Twilight Zone episode, and genre giant Theodore Sturgeon. But as the Enterprise's "five-year mission" (truncated to three by the show's cancellation in 1969) wore on, the involvement of these luminaries lessened and Bloch became increasingly disenchanted, later telling Dennis Fischer in Cinefantastique, "I rewrote all three shows as is accustomed in second draft. You do a first draft, then you make the changes they suggest. I understand from what George Clayton Johnson [whose Star Trek teleplay "The Man Trap" (9/8/66) was the first to be broadcast] said that on the final episode I did, which was under a different staff and another man in charge of production, they wanted a rewrite and they called George in, asked him if he could make certain changes in it, and he flatly refused.

"He said, 'This is the script, it is cohesive. You can't tamper with it without absolutely altering everything in the story.' He said, 'Either you want this kind of a story or you don't.' So that was it for any changes in the rewrite; nothing was done by George or anyone else.... [Television executives], by and large, are not themselves creative. They don't write, they don't direct, they don't act, they don't do the cinematography, but their only function is an executive one....They get a script. They are all behind expensive desks and are drawing down a very handsome salary. Now I ask you, just in terms of common humanity, suppose you were in one of those 27 slots? You were getting scripts daily, and you read them, and you say, 'That's very good,' and you pass it on. After a month, don't you think somebody above you would say, 'What do we need this yo-yo for? All he's doing is saying, "Yeah, I like it."' So they have to make a meaningful contribution in the form of some kind of criticism, some kind of nitpicking in many cases, just so they can make their presence felt."

Hammer Films owed much of its early success to theatrical adaptations of television series and serials, but as Tom Johnson and Deborah Del Vecchio note in their invaluable Hammer Films: An Exhaustive Checklist, "Because of Hammer's success at the box office, there was really no need until the late sixties for the company to become seriously involved in television. However, Hammer's success in the theatres began to wane a bit, and the company's association with 20th Century-Fox led to the production of a television series, Journey to the Unknown. After the completion of A Challenge for Robin Hood [1967], the series went into production at Elstree Studios and lasted through most of 1968. In all, seventeen stories were filmed by producer Joan Harrison, who had made her mark on Alfred Hitchcock Presents a decade earlier. The episodes featured performers who were recognizable to American audiences and premiered on the ABC network on September 26, 1968. The series ran until January 30, 1969, but made little impact in America."

As Bloch recalled in his autobiography, "Joan Harrison was about to produce Journey to the Unknown, a joint venture of Hammer Films and Twentieth Century-Fox. In a moment of folly and madness she asked me to join the team in London and do a couple of scripts for the new anthology series....The first script I turned out was an adaptation of my own story, 'The Indian Spirit Guide' [10/10/68]. It met with favor and they asked for another story of mine, subject to approval by Twentieth Century-Fox's resident geniuses back home on Pico Boulevard. Word was not forthcoming; apparently some of the geniuses were doing a long lunch. Since I was on salary, it was suggested I adapt 'Girl of My Dreams' [12/26/68], a story by friend Dick Matheson which they already owned." Peter Sasdy directed the latter and other episodes, as did Alan Gibson before they graduated to feature films with Hammer's Taste the Blood of Dracula and Crescendo (both 1969), respectively; Robert Stevens and Hammer veterans Roy Ward Baker and Don Chaffey also contributed to the brief series.

Later combined with Gibson's "Poor Butterfly" (1/9/69) in the ersatz TV-movie Journey into Midnight, "The Indian Spirit Guide" was directed by Baker (later of Asylum) and features Julie Harris, an Academy Award nominee for Fred Zinnemann's The Member of the Wedding (1952) and the star of Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963), as Leona Gillings. Scheming secretary Joyce (Tracy Reed) persuades Leona to hire her lover, private eye Jerry Crown (Tom Adams, the strangler in "Method for Murder"), to help contact her late husband Howard, but after Jerry exposes cross-dressing "psychic sensitive" Mrs. Hubbard (Dennis Ramsden) and mystic Edward Chardur (Marne Maitland) as frauds, he aims to marry Leona. She meets medium Sarah Prinn (Catherine Lacey), an old acquaintance of Howard's, and when Sarah's Apache guide, Bright Arrow (Julian Sherrier), appears during her seance and says that Howard wants to warn Leona against Jerry, who was only using her for her money, the skeptic tries to expose him and winds up dead with a trio of arrows in his chest.

"Girl of My Dreams" was adapted by Bloch and television writer Michael J. Bird from a story that was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in October of 1963; mused Matheson, who had already written several screenplays for Hammer Films, "I don't know why they didn't let me do it, because it was an easy thing to adapt." American actor Michael Callan, whose credits include the genre film Mysterious Island (1961), stars as unscrupulous photographer Greg Richards, who obtains money in exchange for specific information that will allow people to prevent various catastrophes, as revealed in precognitive dreams by his reluctant and emotionally dependent wife, Carrie (Zena Walker). When she dreams that the son of wealthy Mrs. Wheeler (Jan Holden) will be run down by a van, Greg thinks he is onto the big score at last, but after the guilt-ridden Carrie gives Mrs. Wheeler the information for nothing, Greg fatally injures her during a violent altercation, only to learn with her dying breath of his own impending murder...date and time unknown.

While he never wrote for The Twilight Zone, Bloch was ironically chosen to novelize the ill-fated 1983 feature-film version, which incorporated remakes of Johnson's "Kick the Can" (2/9/62), Serling's "It's a Good Life" (11/3/61), and Matheson's "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (10/11/63)--all scripted by Matheson himself--plus an original segment by John Landis. Bloch did contribute to Serling's second anthology series, Night Gallery, basing "Logoda's Heads" (12/29/71) on a story by Derleth, and would have been an obvious choice to adapt the work of their mutual mentor, but oddly enough, Lovecraft's "Cool Air" (12/8/71) and "Pickman's Model" (12/1/71) were scripted by Serling and Alvin Sapinsley, respectively. When the show was cut to thirty minutes for syndication, its multiple segments of varying length were often butchered or padded with miscellaneous footage, and in this case actor Tim Matheson (no relation to Richard) had to be brought in to record new narration, explaining the presence of several minutes from Curt Siodmak's Curucu, Beast of the Amazon (1956).

The syndicated version is an unbelievable mishmash, with Matheson explaining in a voiceover to the hilariously mismatched footage how the brother of his character, Henley, and a female colleague, Dr. Irene Winston (actually Beverly Garland in her Curucu role of Dr. Andrea Romar), disappeared on an expedition into jungle territory controlled by Logoda. The story proper begins as Henley and Maj. Crosby (Patrick Macnee) visit the witch doctor (Brock Peters), who claims that his shrunken heads have told him the missing anthropologist drowned in the river, and a young woman from the nearest village, Kyro (Denise Nicholas), tempts his wrath by revealing that the kindly white man was killed while seeking Logoda. Crosby and Henley take her to the residency for safety, but when they are summoned to his hut the next day they find Logoda's torn body, and Kyro tells Henley, "I knew Logoda killed your brother, but I couldn't prove it, so I have avenged him in my own way....Logoda could make the heads speak, but my magic is stronger. You see, I know how to make them kill."

"Once a series has been cancelled, it's like carrion," lamented Jeannot Szwarc, who directed both "Cool Air" and "Logoda's Heads," in Mark Phillips and Frank Garcia's Science Fiction Television Series. "The vultures do what they want. I never saw the episodes in syndication, but I'm sure the overall result was awful." Night Gallery's woes had begun even earlier, however, with Serling (who outlived the show by only two years) trying to remove his name despite two of his scripts, "They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar" (1/20/71) and "The Messiah of Mott Street" (12/15/71), garnering Emmy nominations. To its credit, the series boasted the involvement of future filmmakers like Steven Spielberg (who directed one segment of the 1969 pilot and the first-season episode "Make Me Laugh" [1/6/71]), Szwarc, John Badham, and Leonard Nimoy (who made his directorial debut with "Death on a Barge" [3/4/73]), as well as Twilight Zone veterans Douglas Heyes, Sr., and Ralph Senensky, and featured adaptations of works by a host of respected genre authors.

The anthology series Ghost Story reunited Bloch with William Castle, who had since produced Rosemary's Baby: "He asked me to become its story editor, an invitation I promptly declined. The position traditionally involved eighteen-hour days, lost weekends and an endless chain of last-minute rewrites. 'Don't hurt Bill's feelings,' Gordon Molson said. 'Let's bow out of this graciously. I'll just ask him to double his salary offer.' It was a fine idea but it didn't work. Bill met the offer, which would make me one of the best-paid story editors in the business at that time. He also volunteered to throw in a guarantee of employment for the run of the show and six story-and-teleplay assignments per season in addition. In the end I still had to decline his generous proposal, but he did extract a promise that I would at least do a couple of scripts for him upon completing work on a new novel. The book, which I called Nightworld, appeared the following year. By that time I had already delivered Bill a teleplay, which he rechristened 'House of Evil [11/10/72].'

"He had also made several other changes. The story I concocted was, in a sense, a modernized version of the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale. Its witch was a kindly grandmother whose cookies, properly prepared, took on the powers of voodoo dolls; harming them brought harm to the humans they were molded to resemble. My dual-natured wicked witch and lovable old lady was written with someone like Bette Davis in mind, this being before she portrayed a harridan for Disney. But Bill Castle made a slight witch-switch. Employing some magic of his own, he transformed my grandmother into a grandfather and gave the role to Melvyn Douglas. There went my main character. Another wave of the cigar Bill used as a magic wand, and my cookie-dolls no longer represented specific individuals. There went the supernatural logic of my story. And after the show was aired, there went I, trying to distance myself as much as possible from the necessity of doing any further scripting. I didn't have to go too far, because the series itself soon gave up the ghost," Bloch wrote.

TV-movies proliferated during the early 1970s, and Bloch collaborated with producer Douglas S. Cramer, formerly executive vice president in charge of production for Star Trek, and director Curtis Harrington on a pair of telefilms that he scripted for rival networks ABC and NBC, The Cat Creature (12/11/73) and The Dead Don't Die (1/14/75), respectively.

Harrington had made a noteworthy debut with Night Tide (1961), starring a young Dennis Hopper, and continued his association with its distributor, AIP, by cobbling together Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965, as "John Sebastian") and Queen of Blood (1966) to utilize effects footage from two Soviet films purchased by Roger Corman (see OUTRÉ #17 and 19). Harrington has attracted more of a cult following than major boxoffice success through such offbeat genre films as Games (1967), What's the Matter with Helen? (1971), and Ruby (1977), and starting with The Cat Creature he has directed primarily for television, later working with Cramer once again on episodes of Wonder Woman, Dynasty, and The Colbys.

The Cat Creature, on which Bloch shared the story credit with Cramer and his associate, Wilford Lloyd Baumes, has an extremely checkered history, as he recounted in John Brosnan's seminal study, The Horror People. "I'd done this script for a made-for-TV horror film and at a late stage they changed the leading lady and brought in a rather big-name star [Diahann Carroll, who then had a contractual commitment with the network]. So I had to do a certain amount of rewriting, just to make sure that the new characterization didn't clash with the fantasy elements of the show. So I did that. Then they decided that since she was a star the story would have to change. That is to say she would have to be introduced up front rather than in the second act. Now the normal course of the story called for her introduction in the second act but no, I had to write in a sequence that would introduce her at the beginning. So I restructured it, there was no other way around it, but it destroys the careful build-up in a suspense story when you have to arbitrarily change things.

"The ludicrous thing is that [having fulfilled her contract, Carroll] didn't play the role after all but they still had to shoot it that way. And they had cut out a great deal of what I had written because it was running too long, they said, but when they shot it they discovered that they were twelve minutes short. Twelve minutes short out of seventy-two--one-sixth! If they'd left what I had put in so carefully, all the little touches, the little atmospheric things that were necessary to the build-up, they would have had a perfectly realized script. But they discovered this when they saw the rough-cut and by then the sets had been struck, the actors who had been hired on a per day or week basis were gone--and they had to add twelve minutes. So they recalled two actors and they had part of one set left and part of another; then they contacted me and said that they were shooting in two days time and wanted twelve minutes of script. And do it, they said, in such a way that it integrates with the story and doesn't affect the flow! I did it but it certainly didn't improve the story," he lamented.

The story opens with appraiser Frank Lucas (Kent Smith, the star of Val Lewton's Cat People [1942], to which the film was an homage) inventorying the estate of Hiram Drake and finding a mummy with a gold and emerald cat amulet, but when he leaves the room it is stolen by Joe Sung (Keye Luke), and a cat emerges from the sarchophagus and kills Lucas. After unsuccessfully trying to fence the amulet to Hester Black (Gale Sondergaard), Sung leaves the briefcase that had contained it at her Sorcerer's Shop and she gives it to her sales clerk, Sherry Hastings (Renne Jarrett), who on her way home finds the cat and is hypnotized into jumping from her balcony, so Hester hires Rena Carter (Meredith Baxter) to replace her. Asked to aid Lt. Marco (Stuart Whitman) in his investigation, archaeologist Roger Edmonds (David Hedison) finds the sarchophagus defaced as if by claws and bearing the symbol of the cat-headed goddess Bast, whose priests could turn into cats and were buried alive for making human sacrifices for which she granted them eternal life, and together they seek the amulet.

Hester points them to Sung, Drake's former gardener, but like Lucas he is killed and drained of blood while Marco questions the clerk (John Carradine) at his Skid Row hotel, and when a ticket in Sung's shoe leads them to a pawnbroker (Peter Lorre, Jr.), who is found dying with a knife in his back, Marco suspects Hester and has her shop staked out. The cat hypnotizes the policeman on watch and kills Hester, who had the amulet sewn into the lining of her cape, and Roger learns from his colleague, Dr. Reinhart (John Abbott), that it was used to hold something captive rather than to worship Bast, its inscription reading, "Beware the Seal of Kur-ub-Set, for he who dares to remove it will open the Gates of Hell." Roger tells Rena that the cats gathering around her apartment recognize her as a priestess of Bast, and after he refuses her offer of immortality she changes again and attacks him, but he puts the amulet around her neck and Rena, revealed in full priestess regalia, stumbles outside and reverts to her mummy form, which is soon shredded by the cats and crumbles into dust.

"Two years later we teamed up again for another TV movie," Bloch wrote in his autobiography, "this one based on my story 'The Dead Don't Die' [published in the July 1951 issue of Fantastic Adventures]. Maybe they don't, but the show did. Despite Curtis's casting of accomplished character actors, their supporting roles couldn't prop up the lead [George Hamilton]. And Ray Milland, who had given such a deftly paced performance in my script for 'A Home Away from Home,' merely plodded through his part here like a zombie without a deadline." Set in 1934, the film version was produced by frequent Cramer colleague Henry Colman, with Cramer and Baumes now serving as executive producers, and opens on Death Row in the Illinois State Penitentiary. Don Drake (Hamilton) promises his brother Ralph (Jerry Douglas) that he will find out who really murdered his wife, Frances, and after Ralph goes to the chair, claiming he had blacked out at the time of her death, a mysterious woman later revealed as Vera LaValle (Linda Cristal) attends his lonely funeral.

Don visits Jim Moss (Milland), at whose Chicago dance marathon Frances was killed, and learns that trainer Frankie Specht (James McEachin) found the body but vanished before the trial; later, as Vera warns him to leave town, Don sees Ralph in the street and follows him to an antique shop, where Don accidentally kills the owner, Perdido (Reggie Nalder). Knocked unconscious by Perdido's employee, Levenia (Joan Blondell), Don awakens with Vera, who says she rescued him at gunpoint after the evil Varek lured him to the shop, and when Don demands to see him, Vera takes him to a funeral parlor, where in a chilling scene Varek raises Perdido's body and through its mouth tells Don, "The dead are my children." Lt. Reardon (Ralph Meeker) dismisses Don's story, especially when a visit to Perdido's shop reveals him apparently alive and well, so Don flees and takes refuge with Moss, and while the latter is out looking for leads, Vera appears and says that although she disobeyed his orders to kill Don, she can only belong to Varek, whose voodoo brought her back to life.

Like Ralph, Vera was executed for a murder she did not commit and initially served Varek out of gratitude, but the shock of finding out that he framed her by having one of his zombies kill her employer enabled her to regain her free will, and when the as-yet-unseen Varek senses her betrayal he destroys Vera, burning a doll in her image with a blowtorch. Finally Varek is revealed as Moss, who manipulated Specht into killing Frances and now has Perdido run him over, yet Don dashes his plan to take over the world by shocking Ralph back to his senses, and upon learning that he was framed, the dead man strangles Moss and hangs his body up on a meathook in the cold storage warehouse where he kept his zombies. Interestingly, one of the most significant alterations made by Bloch in adapting his fifty-page novelette for the screen was to the nature of its protagonist, originally a writer of horror fiction amusingly identified as "Bob," who meets the condemned and unrelated convict while working as a guard at the penitentiary and trying unsuccessfully to write a book on the side.

Bloch shared story credit with Robert F. O'Neill, who co-scripted with fellow producer Frank Telford, on "Minotaur" (9/30/76), the second episode of NBC's SF series Gemini Man, featuring Ben Murphy as diver Sam Casey, a secret agent with the power to turn invisible for fifteen minutes at a time as the result of a freak underwater explosion. Known to genre fans as Heywood Floyd in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), William Sylvester was cast as Sam's boss, Leonard Driscoll, while Ross Martin of Wild, Wild West fame guest-starred as Carl Victor; director Alan J. Levi also helmed the eponymous pilot film (5/10/76), written by Outer Limits creator Leslie Stevens and syndicated as Code Name: Minus One. The show itself had a curious history, beginning life in 1975 as The Invisible Man, which like a 1958-59 British series of the same name was inspired by the H.G. Wells novel, and when it was cancelled after only a dozen episodes, it was revamped by the same production team the following fall as Gemini Man, only to die an even quicker death a month later.

Victor is a scientist fired by Driscoll for turning the A-73, designed as a purely defensive surveillance system, into an uncontrollable offensive weapon, and after vanishing along with the robot he has dubbed Minotaur (Loren Janes), whose power he demonstrates to Sam, now threatens to level a skyscraper unless he is paid a half-billion dollars in cash. Learning that Victor is being aided by his daughter Nancy (Deborah Winters), who believes him to be working for world peace, Sam follows her to his secret lab, which is surrounded by a maze, but as in Greek mythology he is trapped inside the labyrinth with the Minotaur and, detected with infrared in spite of his invisibility, knocked unconscious and captured. His power temporarily neutralized, Sam opens Nancy's eyes to her father's madness and true intentions, and when Victor threatens to destroy the headquarters of Driscoll's organization, Intersect, the robot rebels and goes after Sam, who joins forces with Nancy to disable it by lassoing Minotaur with an electric hoist, leaving Victor mentally shattered by its betrayal.

Bloch's early Lovecraftian story "The Mannikin," which also refers to "Ludvig Prinn's infamous Mysteries of the Worm," was adapted as an episode of the 1977 anthology series Classics Dark and Dangerous, produced by the Ontario Educational Communications Authority in association with Highgate Productions and the Canadian Broadcasting Company. The nameless narrator of the story, published in Weird Tales in April 1936, expresses his growing concern over the condition of his erudite but misshapen and misanthropic friend Simon Maglore, shunned by his fellow residents of Bridgetown because of the hump that disfigures his back and the rumors of witchcraft in his family dating back for generations. Increasingly isolated as his hump grows and his mental and physical health deteriorate, he embarks upon progressively arcane studies that also alarm the narrator, who at last breaks into his house to find the unfortunate Simon dead, the victim of a grotesque, sentient figure growing from his back, which controlled his will and bit him to death when he tried to rebel.

Directed by Donald W. Thompson (billed as Don Thompson), best known for a series of fundamentalist apocalypse films beginning with A Thief in the Night (1972), the uncredited script updates the story to the present and transforms Simon into a singer, Simone; Ronee Blakley starred and wrote her own songs, as she had in Robert Altman's Nashville (1975). Following the death of her mother, who along with the sinister housekeeper, Miss Smith (Pol Pelletier), had forced her to participate in seances as a child, Simone Maglore is plagued by mysterious voices and a recurring pain in her back, so Dr. Paul Carstairs (Cec Linder from Goldfinger [1964]) refers her to a psychologist, David Priestley (Keir Dullea of 2001 fame). Now bearing a hump, Simone returns to her hated childhood home, where Miss Smith frees the mannikin, but when a concerned David traces her there he is dismissed by the suddenly serene Simone, and as he drives away, planning to return the next day with Carstairs, he is killed by the bug-eyed green monster, which has concealed itself in the back seat of his car.

An old adage holds that the quality of a script is inversely proportional to the number of writers involved, so perhaps the less said the better about executive producer Irwin Allen's miniseries The Return of Captain Nemo (aka The Amazing Captain Nemo), an unsold CBS pilot shown theatrically in Europe, on which Bloch was but one of six credited screenwriters. For the record, the others were Norman Katkov, Preston Wood, Robert C. Dennis, William Keys, and Mann Rubin--all television veterans, as was director Alex March of Allen's series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, while the show was broadcast in three parts: "Deadly Blackmail" (3/8/78), "Duel in the Deep" (3/15/78), and "Atlantis Dead Ahead" (3/22/78). Awoken from a century of suspended animation by Navy divers Tom Franklin (Tom Hallick) and Jim Porter (Burr De Benning), Jules Verne's hero (José Ferrer) pits the Nautilus against the supersub of Prof. Cunningham (Burgess Meredith), who plans to destroy Washington, D.C., and, recalling Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (1970), seeks lost Atlantis.

Hosted by the author himself, the British anthology series Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected debuted in 1979 and initially featured dramatizations by Ronald Harwood of his celebrated stories, many of which had already been done on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, including a remake of "The Landlady" (10/6/79) starring Siobhan McKenna in the title role. When John Houseman replaced Dahl, the title was shortened to Tales of the Unexpected (not to be confused with the short-lived NBC series of the same name), accommodating works by other writers such as an adaptation of Bloch's "Fat Chance" (11/15/80), which was published in Keyhole in 1960 and concerned "a typical middle-class American couple," John and Mary. In the story, John becomes disgusted with Mary's obesity and begins carrying on with her best friend Frances, but after conspiring with the shady Dr. Applegate (played on TV by the seemingly ubiquitous Geoffrey Bayldon) to poison Mary while Frances is on a trip, he learns that she has unwittingly given the arsenic-laced chocolates to Frances as a farewell present.

During the 1980s, numerous attempts were made to return to the anthology show format on network, syndicated, and cable television, including executive producer Steven Spielberg's high-profile flop Amazing Stories and equally ill-fated revivals of both Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone, but none proved as enduring as the originals. One of the first, and one of the quickest to leave the airwaves, was ABC's Darkroom, which was hosted by James Coburn and, like Night Gallery, featured multiple stories of varying lengths in each of its seven hour-long shows, including a remake of the Thriller episode "Guillotine" (1/8/82) and adaptations of works by Davis Grubb, Robert R. McCammon and Fredric Brown. Christopher Crowe, who produced the series with Gemini Man alumnus Robert F. O'Neill, faithfully adapted William F. Nolan's ghoulish story "The Partnership" (12/25/81), and Nolan himself, who notes that the episode was their highest-rated, wrote a teleplay based on another of his stories, "The Party," but the show was cancelled before it could be produced.

Bloch adapted three of his own stories, starting with "The Bogeyman Will Get You" (12/4/81), which was published in Weird Tales in 1946, and just as Jodie Foster, later an Oscar winner for The Accused (1988) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991), had appeared in "House of Evil," this starred Helen Hunt, a future recipient for As Good as It Gets (1997). Directed by sometime cinematographer John McPherson, the show depicts Nancy Lawrence's growing conviction that Phillip Ames (Randolph Powell), who is writing a book in the cabin across the lake from her parents and appears only at night, is a vampire, especially after she finds the murdered body of her missing friend, Julie, in the lake with its throat mutilated. Her search of his cabin reveals that he has no mirrors and is studying demonology (including a copy of De Vermis Mysteriis, complete with worm), yet when Phillip finds her looking for clues in the boathouse, he gazes into a mirror to prove that he is not a vampire, but sadly says that she will have to be silenced anyway, and reveals that he is, in fact, a werewolf.

Based on a brief story from his 1965 collection The Skull of the Marquis de Sade, "A Quiet Funeral" (12/18/81) brought Bloch back together with Curtis Harrington, once again effectively using a funeral parlor setting, and starred Robert F. Lyons and Eugene Roche, who had appeared together earlier in the genre telefilm The Ghost of Flight 401 (2/18/78). "A small-time hood with big ideas," Marty Vetch (Lyons) learns that Charlie the Printer (Roche), a consummate counterfeiter and forger, will be making a delivery one stormy night, so he forces Charlie off the road, wedging him inside under the smashed steering wheel, and takes the briefcase containing $50,000 before pushing the vengeful victim's car over a bluff. Hiding out in Vegas with his girlfriend Leda (Misty Rowe) to establish an alibi, Vetch sees a notice of Charlie's funeral in the Detroit paper and returns to keep up appearances, but at the oddly empty mortuary Charlie rises from the coffin, revealing that he survived the crash and forged the obituary, and locks Vetch inside the casket, where his screams will soon cease.

"Catnip" (12/25/81) was directed by executive story consultant Jeffrey Bloom, who later adapted V.C. Andrews's Flowers in the Attic (1987), and considerably updated by Bloch from his story, published in the March 1948 issue of Weird Tales, in which fourteen-year-old protagonist Ronnie Shires is trying to influence the outcome of a school election. Here, Ronnie (Cyril O'Reilly) is a motorcycle-riding drug dealer who kills a reputed witch, Mrs. Mingle (Jocelyn Brando, who appeared in "'Til Death Do Us Part" almost twenty years earlier), with a bomb intended for her hated black cat, rather than burning her home with a carelessly-tossed cigarette butt as in the story, but in both versions his fate is the same. After Mrs. Mingle's death, her vengeful cat follows Ronnie everywhere, eventually entering through his bedroom window when he returns home to attack him as he opens his mouth to scream, whereupon his mother (Lynn Carlin), calling him from downstairs with no response, utters the quintessentially Blochian punchline, "What's the matter, cat got your tongue?"

Debuting in 1984, the syndicated series Tales from the Darkside was the creation of Laurel Entertainment, in which writer-director George A. Romero was then partnered with Richard P. Rubinstein, his producer on Martin, Dawn of the Dead (both 1978), Knightriders (1981), Creepshow (1982), and Day of the Dead (1985), after which Romero left Laurel. Rubinstein then became closely associated with Stephen King, who had written Creepshow and contributed stories to Tales from the Darkside in both its television and 1990 feature film incarnations, and Rubinstein went on to produce the adaptations of King's Pet Sematary (1989), The Stand (1994), The Langoliers (1995), Thinner (1996) and The Night Flier (1997). Several of Bloch's stories were featured on the series, including "A Case of the Stubborns" (12/2/84), published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1976, which was directed by Jerry Smith and adapted by James Houghton; best known for the irreverent comedies he made with writer-director Preston Sturges, Eddie Bracken starred as Grandpa.

Widowed Addie Tolliver (Barbara Eda Young) and her son, Jody (rising heartthrob Christian Slater, who later appeared in Tales from the Darkside: The Movie), are mourning the passing of her father Titus the night before when Grandpa himself comes downstairs, dressed in his funeral suit and demanding breakfast, too stubborn to acknowledge his death. Despite Doc Snodgrass (Bill McCutcheon) detecting no heartbeat and showing him his death certificate, Grandpa--already starting to turn in the hot weather, courtesy of Ed French's makeup--rejects the suggestion of Rev. Peabody (Brent Spiner, three years before playing Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation) that "now it's time to lie down and call it quits." Finally, the desperate Jody goes to Spooky Hollow and consults the Voodoo Woman (Tresa Hughes), who gives him a bag of strong black pepper to put in Grandpa's napkin, and after sneezing his nose off, he finally accept this as irrevocable proof and goes voluntarily upstairs where, as Addie tells Jody, "He done laid down his burden at last. Gone to glory, amen."

In 1985, five years after the director's death, NBC revived Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which ran for a single season executive produced by Darkroom veteran Christopher Crowe (with new episodes produced for the USA Network two years later), using colorized versions of Hitchcock's wraparounds from the classic series and a mix of original episodes and remakes. Among the latter were "Method Actor" (11/10/85), a retitled version of "Bad Actor" starring Martin Sheen, and "The Gloating Place" (1/5/86), which was directed by Christopher Leitch, who helmed the recent TV-movie remake Satan's School for Girls (2000), and adapted from Bloch's story by David Stenn, subsequently a supervising producer for Beverly Hills, 90210. Subverting Bloch's concept, Samantha Loomis (Isabelle Walker) recounts an encounter with an existing killer and is made into a minor media celebrity by TV reporter Carl Cansino (Stephen Macht), but when her rival, Debbie Spooner (Christie Houser), reports a similar attack, Sam mistakenly assumes she too has lied, and both girls are killed by Carl himself.

While recovering from various eye surgeries during the mid-1980s, Bloch took a tempo