John Kenneth Muir's Blog, page 894
June 5, 2012
Cult-TV Flashback: The Burning Zone (1996 - 1997)
The
Clinton Era (1992 – 2000) represents the golden age of conspiracy and horror
genre television. This development was
due in large part to the unexpected and transcendent success of Chris Carter’s The
X-Files , which became a ratings hit in the early 1990s and ran for an
incredible nine seasons.
In
The
X-Files’ wake came Nowhere Man (1995 – 1996), Strange
Luck (1995 – 1996), American Gothic (1995 – 1996), Dark
Skies ( 1996 – 1997), Millennium (1996 – 1999), Sleepwalkers
(1997), Prey (1998), Strange World (1999), and other
efforts, including UPN’s The Burning Zone (1996 – 1997).
Created
by Coleman Luck, The Burning Zone boasted important antecedents outside The
X-Files as well. The mid-1990s
also happened to be the great era of “virus”-centric pop-culture entertainment,
from the book The Hot Zone -- a
true-life account of an Ebola outbreak in Virginia -- to Outbreak (1995), a
horror film which pitted scientists Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo and Kevin Spacey
against hemorrhagic fever in California.
The
Burning Zone
brought a similar premise to TV on a weekly basis: “Today’s battle to save humanity is fought in sterile labs with petri
dishes and test tubes for weapons.
Virologists and geneticists are the new warriors,” described Coleman
Luck in SFX #18, November 1996
(page 10).
Accordingly,
The
Burning Zone , which ran for nineteen hour-long episodes, followed the dangerous
missions of a small bio-crisis team dedicated to eradicating new and deadly
diseases in what the series described as “The Plague Wars.”
Theteam leader was Daniel Cassian (Michael Harris), a no-nonsense doctor with “Level
92” clearance and a firm grip over his emotions. He was assisted by Dr. Edward Marcase
(Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a virologist who survived a childhood case of Ebola but
lost both parents to the disease.
Edward’s controversial approach to medicine considered the curing of
disease a “mystical” experience, a supernatural quest.
Other
team members were Kimberly Shiroma (Tamlyn Tomita), a
molecular-geneticist-pathologist recruited from the World Health Organization,
and Michael Hailey (James Black), the man responsible for the team’s overall
security.
After
eleven episodes, The Burning Zone endured a dramatic format shift and cast
change. Shiroma and Marcase left the
team, replaced by Dr. Brian Taft (Bradford Tatum), a motorcycle-riding,
rebellious James Dean-like physician.
The re-boot of the series largely abandoned the (much-criticized)
supernatural angle and featured more action-oriented stories. Only Harris and Black appeared throughout
both formats. Cassian became the primary
hero, after playing a kind of Dr. Smith-like thorn in the side for the first
run of shows.
As
you might well expect, critics were not particularly kind evaluating this genre
series. Writing for The Skeptical Inquirer in May-June of 1998, Peter Huston observed
that the series made him “want to throw
shoes at the television” and noted that it featured “Snarly fashion-model scientists chasing intelligent hive-mind vampire
zombie viruses with flame throwers.”
And
yes, that may be the best line ever written in a TV review.
Meanwhile,
The New York Times’ Caryn James
opined that the UPN series mostly served to remind viewers just how good The
X-Files really was, and noted that The Burning Zone offered “the loopy delights of a cut-rate,
over-the-top horror movie.”
Only
Roger Fulton’s and John Betancourt’s The Sci-Fi Channel Encyclopedia of TV
Science- Fiction (Warner Books; 1997, page 106) reserved such harsh judgment,
calling The Burning Zone a series that “went thought so many transformations in its brief 19-episode run that
no viewer who saw the first show would recognize the last.”
I
watched The Burning Zone when it aired, and although I wholeheartedly
concur with the largely-negative sentiments, I wouldn’t mind seeing the program
(along with Sleepwalkers and Prey …) released on DVD. Ever since I
first saw it, I’ve always considered The Burning Zone a kind of
“disease-of-the-week” show. But what
made it so memorable were indeed the goofy plot-lines and various diseases that
had to be cured.
Among
these were ones that caused fear (“The Silent Tower”), rage (“St. Michael’s
Nightmare”) spontaneous combustion (“Arms of Fire,”) insanity (“Critical Mass”),
skeletal collapse (“Death Song”), hypothyroidism (“The Last Five Pounds are the
Hardest”), and hemorrhagic fever (“Night Fever”).
Other
stories dealt with a dimension of death (“Lethal Injection”), the disease that
destroyed the Mayan civilization (“Touch of the Dead”), psychic surgery (“Hall
of the Serpent”), an occult Nazi weapon called “The Eyes of Odin” (“Midnight of
the Carrier”) and a flesh-eating virus (“Elegy for a Dream.”)
The
quality that distinguished and perhaps harmed The Burning Zone the most
was its insistence on blending hard science with spiritual or religious
sub-plots. Most of the protagonists in the series are highly-trained physicians
who had gone through years if not decades of training. Yet in story after story, these men and women
of science found themselves exploring the “spirit” in ways they certainly
couldn’t have anticipated back at med school.
Now,
if this idea had been applied consistently, intelligently and believably, it
could have proved an interesting subtext for the program: medicine vs. spiritualism.
But The Burning Zone never seemed to understand that science had to
come first for these doctors working the front lines of the plague war. One episode involved a cure that was made
from the “venomous fruit” of the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. It was just…wacky.
“Touch
of the Dead” followed a similarly bizarre trajectory. In this tale, Cassian was infected by a
terrible disease with no scientific cure.
He survived because he found a “reason to live:” a healthy soul!
Next
time I’m sick, remind me to save my fifteen dollar co-pay and see if this
technique works.
Meanwhile,
“Arms of Fire” pushed the same anti-science notion when a boy in danger of
spontaneously combusting (!) survived the horrible ordeal by expressing his
willingness to pray.
Now,
I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with faith or belief. Only that for
a science-oriented series to continually fall back on religion as a basis for
its cures is ridiculous. If this were
the direction the show wanted to go in, it should have featured clergy, not
scientists, as main characters.
Perhaps
the most memorable expression of The Burning Zone’s spiritual
philosophy occurred in the installment called “Lethal Injection.” There, Marcase visited a hellish “after life”
dimension after taking an experimental drug.
In the after-life, he encountered whispering, black-shrouded ghosts who
could remove a man’s spirit by touch. But
he was protected from the loss of his soul by beings he termed “angels.” At the end of the episode, Marcase – again, a well-educated scientist, remember
– theorized that this alternate dimension was actually an entrance to Hell for
angels who had fallen from grace.
Quite
a significant discovery for someone working on a bio-crisis team, huh? I wonder
why he never shared his confirmation of a spiritual plane with the rest of the
world, however. Seems like an important
thing for the human race to be aware of…
If
science and religion didn’t fit together well in the stories, then the science
component by itself was a frequent stumbling block on The Burning Zone . The series relied on the straight-faced
belief that a disease could be isolated, diagnosed, cured, and its effect totally reversed in every single episode.
Though
this is drama we’re talking about and some rule bending is necessary and expected,
this series simply asked viewers to suspend disbelief too much. The Burning Zone wanted the audience
to believe that this elite medical team could stop outbreaks faster than a
speeding bullet.
On the series, there
was never once a disease the doctors couldn’t overcome, and most of the
horrible plagues and viruses didn’t even leave behind scars or pock-marks on
their victims. Had some of these
horrible diseases left at least a residual indication of their presence, The
Burning Zone might have felt a little more real. Or, maybe it could have taken a three-or-four
episode arc to cure a particular disease, showing the process over a period of
several weeks or months. That kind of
approach would have been much more true to life as we know it..
As
far as the format changes go, The Burning Zone only went from bad
to worse. Visually, the show developed a new visual
sheen in its last dozen or so programs, with sudden and largely purposeless
zooms, distorted angles, fast-motion photography, hand-held camerawork and so
forth. These stylistic bells and
whistles, however, could not hide the basic banality of the new stories.
One
episode (“Death Song”) actually re-hashed The Bodyguard (1991) with Hailey
protecting and romancing a beautiful rock star.
Another episode was a variation on Duchovny’s Playing God (1997), with Taft forced to administer
medical care to a sick gangster.
At
least the original approach -- the
juxtaposition of the medical with the miraculous – offered something to
think about, even if you dismissed it as ridiculous. The later approach was The Burning Zone... lobotomized.
And
believe me, that is really saying something.
Cult-TV Flashback: The Burning Zone (1996 - 1999)
The
Clinton Era (1992 – 2000) represents the golden age of conspiracy and horror
genre television. This development was
due in large part to the unexpected and transcendent success of Chris Carter’s The
X-Files , which became a ratings hit in the early 1990s and ran for an
incredible nine seasons.
In
The
X-Files’ wake came Nowhere Man (1995 – 1996), Strange
Luck (1995 – 1996), American Gothic (1995 – 1996), Dark
Skies ( 1996 – 1997), Millennium (1996 – 1999), Sleepwalkers
(1997), Prey (1998), Strange World (1999), and other
efforts, including UPN’s The Burning Zone (1996 – 1997).
Created
by Coleman Luck, The Burning Zone boasted important antecedents outside The
X-Files as well. The mid-1990s
also happened to be the great era of “virus”-centric pop-culture entertainment,
from the book The Hot Zone -- a
true-life account of an Ebola outbreak in Virginia -- to Outbreak (1995), a
horror film which pitted scientists Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo and Kevin Spacey
against hemorrhagic fever in California.
The
Burning Zone
brought a similar premise to TV on a weekly basis: “Today’s battle to save humanity is fought in sterile labs with petri
dishes and test tubes for weapons.
Virologists and geneticists are the new warriors,” described Coleman
Luck in SFX #18, November 1996
(page 10).
Accordingly,
The
Burning Zone , which ran for nineteen hour-long episodes, followed the dangerous
missions of a small bio-crisis team dedicated to eradicating new and deadly
diseases in what the series described as “The Plague Wars.”
Theteam leader was Daniel Cassian (Michael Harris), a no-nonsense doctor with “Level
92” clearance and a firm grip over his emotions. He was assisted by Dr. Edward Marcase
(Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a virologist who survived a childhood case of Ebola but
lost both parents to the disease.
Edward’s controversial approach to medicine considered the curing of
disease a “mystical” experience, a supernatural quest.
Other
team members were Kimberly Shiroma (Tamlyn Tomita), a
molecular-geneticist-pathologist recruited from the World Health Organization,
and Michael Hailey (James Black), the man responsible for the team’s overall
security.
After
eleven episodes, The Burning Zone endured a dramatic format shift and cast
change. Shiroma and Marcase left the
team, replaced by Dr. Brian Taft (Bradford Tatum), a motorcycle-riding,
rebellious James Dean-like physician.
The re-boot of the series largely abandoned the (much-criticized)
supernatural angle and featured more action-oriented stories. Only Harris and Black appeared throughout
both formats. Cassian became the primary
hero, after playing a kind of Dr. Smith-like thorn in the side for the first
run of shows.
As
you might well expect, critics were not particularly kind evaluating this genre
series. Writing for The Skeptical Inquirer in May-June of 1998, Peter Huston observed
that the series made him “want to throw
shoes at the television” and noted that it featured “Snarly fashion-model scientists chasing intelligent hive-mind vampire
zombie viruses with flame throwers.”
And
yes, that may be the best line ever written in a TV review.
Meanwhile,
The New York Times’ Caryn James
opined that the UPN series mostly served to remind viewers just how good The
X-Files really was, and noted that The Burning Zone offered “the loopy delights of a cut-rate,
over-the-top horror movie.”
Only
Roger Fulton’s and John Betancourt’s The Sci-Fi Channel Encyclopedia of TV
Science- Fiction (Warner Books; 1997, page 106) reserved such harsh judgment,
calling The Burning Zone a series that “went thought so many transformations in its brief 19-episode run that
no viewer who saw the first show would recognize the last.”
I
watched The Burning Zone when it aired, and although I wholeheartedly
concur with the largely-negative sentiments, I wouldn’t mind seeing the program
(along with Sleepwalkers and Prey …) released on DVD. Ever since I
first saw it, I’ve always considered The Burning Zone a kind of
“disease-of-the-week” show. But what
made it so memorable were indeed the goofy plot-lines and various diseases that
had to be cured.
Among
these were ones that caused fear (“The Silent Tower”), rage (“St. Michael’s
Nightmare”) spontaneous combustion (“Arms of Fire,”) insanity (“Critical Mass”),
skeletal collapse (“Death Song”), hypothyroidism (“The Last Five Pounds are the
Hardest”), and hemorrhagic fever (“Night Fever”).
Other
stories dealt with a dimension of death (“Lethal Injection”), the disease that
destroyed the Mayan civilization (“Touch of the Dead”), psychic surgery (“Hall
of the Serpent”), an occult Nazi weapon called “The Eyes of Odin” (“Midnight of
the Carrier”) and a flesh-eating virus (“Elegy for a Dream.”)
The
quality that distinguished and perhaps harmed The Burning Zone the most
was its insistence on blending hard science with spiritual or religious
sub-plots. Most of the protagonists in the series are highly-trained physicians
who had gone through years if not decades of training. Yet in story after story, these men and women
of science found themselves exploring the “spirit” in ways they certainly
couldn’t have anticipated back at med school.
Now,
if this idea had been applied consistently, intelligently and believably, it
could have proved an interesting subtext for the program: medicine vs. spiritualism.
But The Burning Zone never seemed to understand that science had to
come first for these doctors working the front lines of the plague war. One episode involved a cure that was made
from the “venomous fruit” of the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. It was just…wacky.
“Touch
of the Dead” followed a similarly bizarre trajectory. In this tale, Cassian was infected by a
terrible disease with no scientific cure.
He survived because he found a “reason to live:” a healthy soul!
Next
time I’m sick, remind me to save my fifteen dollar co-pay and see if this
technique works.
Meanwhile,
“Arms of Fire” pushed the same anti-science notion when a boy in danger of
spontaneously combusting (!) survived the horrible ordeal by expressing his
willingness to pray.
Now,
I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with faith or belief. Only that for
a science-oriented series to continually fall back on religion as a basis for
its cures is ridiculous. If this were
the direction the show wanted to go in, it should have featured clergy, not
scientists, as main characters.
Perhaps
the most memorable expression of The Burning Zone’s spiritual
philosophy occurred in the installment called “Lethal Injection.” There, Marcase visited a hellish “after life”
dimension after taking an experimental drug.
In the after-life, he encountered whispering, black-shrouded ghosts who
could remove a man’s spirit by touch. But
he was protected from the loss of his soul by beings he termed “angels.” At the end of the episode, Marcase – again, a well-educated scientist, remember
– theorized that this alternate dimension was actually an entrance to Hell for
angels who had fallen from grace.
Quite
a significant discovery for someone working on a bio-crisis team, huh? I wonder
why he never shared his confirmation of a spiritual plane with the rest of the
world, however. Seems like an important
thing for the human race to be aware of…
If
science and religion didn’t fit together well in the stories, then the science
component by itself was a frequent stumbling block on The Burning Zone . The series relied on the straight-faced
belief that a disease could be isolated, diagnosed, cured, and its effect totally reversed in every single episode.
Though
this is drama we’re talking about and some rule bending is necessary and expected,
this series simply asked viewers to suspend disbelief too much. The Burning Zone wanted the audience
to believe that this elite medical team could stop outbreaks faster than a
speeding bullet.
On the series, there
was never once a disease the doctors couldn’t overcome, and most of the
horrible plagues and viruses didn’t even leave behind scars or pock-marks on
their victims. Had some of these
horrible diseases left at least a residual indication of their presence, The
Burning Zone might have felt a little more real. Or, maybe it could have taken a three-or-four
episode arc to cure a particular disease, showing the process over a period of
several weeks or months. That kind of
approach would have been much more true to life as we know it..
As
far as the format changes go, The Burning Zone only went from bad
to worse. Visually, the show developed a new visual
sheen in its last dozen or so programs, with sudden and largely purposeless
zooms, distorted angles, fast-motion photography, hand-held camerawork and so
forth. These stylistic bells and
whistles, however, could not hide the basic banality of the new stories.
One
episode (“Death Song”) actually re-hashed The Bodyguard (1991) with Hailey
protecting and romancing a beautiful rock star.
Another episode was a variation on Duchovny’s Playing God (1997), with Taft forced to administer
medical care to a sick gangster.
At
least the original approach -- the
juxtaposition of the medical with the miraculous – offered something to
think about, even if you dismissed it as ridiculous. The later approach was The Burning Zone... lobotomized.
And
believe me, that is really saying something.
June 4, 2012
Cult-TV Theme Watch: Adam and Eve
In
terms of Christian mythology Adam and Eve are the first human couple on Earth,
created by God to dwell in paradise in the Garden of Eden, but eventually
expelled from their utopia after sampling fruit from the forbidden Tree of
Knowledge.
In
the Bible, Genesis enumerates and describes the children and descendants of
Adam and Eve, our ancestors and generations past. In terms of modern science, however we
understand that the idea of the diverse human race springing from just a single
couple is, let’s say, genetically improbable.
Despite
such modern knowledge and information, Adam and Eve remain potent symbols, and
important figures in cult television history.
This may be because, subconsciously, humans look to parental figures for
comfort and succor. Adam and Eve – the first of our kind – are the parents
of the entire human race.
Or
perhaps the focus on Adam and Eve in cult-television may be one related to scorn
and upset. The duo beheld and
experienced paradise, but disobeyed the edicts of God, and started this whole
crazy world in motion. All our strife,
in a way, is their fault, a product of their fallible human nature, which we share.
Also,
I suspect Adam and Eve carry so much resonance in our modern culture because,
in a way, humans are self-destructive.
We universally contemplate the end of what exists now, and the beginning
of something else, something new (and hopefully better). If our world ends, will two new “parents” – a new Adam and new Eve – emerge to lead
us to greener pastures?
An
Adam and Eve story, showing the population of a virgin Earth by aliens, for instance, is
widely termed a “Shaggy God” story in science fiction circles, and considered a
cliché by many greats of the form.
The
Adam and Eve paradigm appeared memorably on two episodes of Rod Serling’s The
Twilight Zone (1959 – 1964).
In
the first, entitled “Two,” a terrible, apocalyptic war has destroyed most of
the civilized world, leaving only, two survivors. One is an American soldier, played by Charles
Bronson. The other is a Russian soldier, played by Elizabeth Montgomery. In a ruined metropolis, they eye each other
suspiciously for a time, unable at first to give up the hatred that fueled their
global conflict. But over time, the duo
comes to accept their situation, and accept each other. In the end, the female soldier – wearing a wedding dress she has found in an
abandoned store -- and the male soldier – adorned in something like a tuxedo – march off together. The implication is that they will re-start
the human race together, and merge in peace the forces of two destructive foes.
Twilight
Zone’s “Probe
7 Over and Out” followed a similar Adam and Eve-styled outline. A male soldier, Cook (Richard Basehart) lands
his spaceship on a habitable world, only to learn that his home world has
succumbed to a terrible nuclear war.
As
he sets out to familiarize himself with this new planet, he meets another
alien, a beautiful woman refugee from another world named “Norda.” He introduces himself as Adam Cook. She is Eve Norda. They call the planet “Irth,” and share a
seppla (apple?) in a garden-like setting.
The story, by creator Rod Serling is clearly an origin tale, a tale of
our beginnings on Earth as the progeny of ancient astronauts.
In
1965, Star Trek’s first pilot, “The Cage” offered a variation on this
oft-seen trope. Here, Captain Pike (Jeffrey Hunter) is captured by an alien
race living on Talos IV in the hopes that he will mate with another captured
human, Vina (Susan Oliver). Together, they
would be the father and mother of a new race of humans, ones destined to dwell
on the desolate planet surface and do the hard physical labor that the
mentally-superior but physically fragile Talosians cannot. Although the Talosians tempt Captain Pike
with visions of Vina in different settings -- and indeed as different women -- he
refuses to participate in the plan to create a race of humans as slaves. One such fantasy involves Captain Pike and
Vina in a picnic setting like a garden, clearly evoking the Adam and Eve story.
Interestingly, the second Star Trek pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before" also features overtones of the famous Adam and Eve tale. Only here, a race of dangerous ESP-ers -- consisting of parents Gary Mitchell and Dr. Dehner as Adam and Eve -- could be born on Delta Vega, if Captain Kirk (William Shatner) doesn't prevent it. The implication is that if the new race is born, the human race will die, rendered obsolete and inferior.
The
final episode of Space: 1999’s Year One, “The Testament of Arkadia” by the late, great Johnny
Byrne, featured both an ancient astronaut and Adam and Eve angle.
In
this profound tale, Earth’s errant moon is stopped dead in space near a planet,
Arkadia. While exploring the planet,
Commander Koenig (Martin Landau) and his reconnaissance team discover a cave
filled with human skeletons and writings that resemble Sanskrit. The writings tell of how the ancient
Arkadians brought the seeds of life to a distant planet, Earth, some 40,000
years earlier. Two members of Koenig’s
team, Luke (Orso Maria Guerrini) and Anna (Lisa Harrow) become obsessed and
possessed by the idea of returning that favor, and restoring life to Arkadia, a
world which has been rendered lifeless in a nuclear war. Over Koenig’s objections, Luke and Anna set
out on this endeavor, and in the process, become Arkadia’s new Adam and new
Eve.
A
second season episode of Space: 1999 , titled “New Adam, New
Eve” made the idea even more literal. A
God-like alien called Magus (Guy Rolfe) captures Commander Koenig, Helena
Russell (Barbara Bain), Maya (Catherine Schell) and Tony Verdeschi (Tony
Anholt) and brings them to a garden spot on “New Earth,” where they can mate
and begin a new human race. The wrinkle in the plan, however, is that Magus
boasts very explicit match-making plans.
He wants Koenig and Maya together, and Tony and Helena as a couple,
which goes against the humans’ romantic inclinations.
Logan’ s
Run: The Series (1977) also offered an Adam and Eve-like premise, with
Logan (Gregory Harrison) and Jessica (Heather Menzies) “cast-out” from the
Domed City and wandering the wasteland in search of Sanctuary, a place of safety
where they can live as “normal” human beings and even start families. In one episode, “The Collectors,” a fake
Sanctuary is explicitly visualized as a kind of garden location, harking back
to the Biblical Eden. Uniquely, the
series’ android (REM) might be interpreted as the very embodiment of “knowledge,”
but is seen as an heroic figure rather than an evil Serpent.
The
second season Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979 – 1981)
episode “The Crystals” involved a landing party from Searcher, led by Buck (Gil
Gerard), encountering a beautiful, innocent girl, Laura (Amanda Wyss). She awoke on the planet alone, confused about her origins and history. She soon discovered that the shambling mummy
monster threatening the landing party would actually transform into her equally
innocent male mate, and that they would start life anew on the planet. They were the Adam and Eve of a distant world, but in this re-telling, Eve came first.
Some
years later, Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s second season presented “Some
Assembly Required” a kind of Bride of Frankenstein /Adam and Eve
tale, wherein Cordelia Chase (Charisma Carpenter) was captured by an amateur
surgeon and prepared to become the wife of a football jock -- the surgeon’s
brother -- brought back to life through replacement surgeries.
A
notorious – and utterly intriguing – Millennium
first season episode, “Loin like a Hunting Flame,” involved a serial
killer who was hoping to gain a kind of sexual innocence after his honeymoon
night went horribly wrong. After killing
his first victims, the killer positioned their corpses – in a botanical garden spot—as the Biblical Adam and Eve.
The
premise of both Battlestar Galactica incarnations has nipped around the edges
of the famous Adam and Eve story. The
Commander of the Galactica is named Adama (a variation of Adam), and in both tales
he delivers his fleet to a would-be paradise called Earth. In the Ron Moore remake, the series ends (in “Daybreak”)
as the humans forsake knowledge – their technology
– and live in a simple paradise to breed with the native inhabitants. In short, the members of the Rag-Tag fleet
are all Adams and Eves, our ancestors here on Earth.
The Cult-TV Faces of: Adam and Eve
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
June 3, 2012
Television and Cinema Verities # 22
"What happened was I was initially approached about a show about a group of college graduates who decide to buy a house together. It struck me that wasn’t the most thrilling or scintillating idea I’d ever heard, and I was on the verge of turning it down...We decided that we were going to have one last meeting and then if nothing came of that, we were going to call it a day. In sort of a kamikaze move, I suddenly said, “Well of course what we could do is turn George into a werewolf,” because if nothing else, that would give a story for the first episode..."
Toby Whithouse, creator of Being Human , discusses the program's unusual genesis in an interview with UGO, from 2010.
Cult-TV Blogging: Ghost Story: "The New House" (March 17, 1972)
Ghost
Story/Circle of Fear
(1972 – 1973) represents the TV collaboration of William Castle, the great
1950s exploitation showman responsible for “Emergo” and “Percepto,” and Richard Matheson, brilliant scribe of The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957),
The
Omega Man (1971), The Legend of Hell House (1971) and Somewhere
in Time (1980), among others.
The
TV series -- a one-hour horror anthology -- ran for just one season on NBC in the
early 1970s, and starred (as host) actor Sebastian Cabot. He played “Winston Essex,” the “old world aristocrat" and owner of the upscale hotel/bed-and-breakfast called Mansfield House.
In each episode of Ghost Story, Mr. Essex
would reveal an unusual and macabre story about his various guests. This aspect – the host and his world – were dropped from the series entirely when
it transitioned into Circle of Fear after fourteen
hour-long episodes.
As
Ghost
Story geared up for broadcast, co-creator and producer William Castle
wrote that it would involve “strange
happenings” and “ordinary people,”
and that his intentiion was “not merely
to shock or scare, but to do it in a fun way. Like a ride on a roller
coaster. You scream and you laugh.”
(John J. O’Connor, The New York Times: “Cabot in Ghost Story , A Chiller
Series,” September 29, 1972, page 87).
Despite
the promise of a good time, the series was not particularly well-received by
critics, though this is hardly unexpected given the mainstream perception of the horror genre during
that time period. Time Magazine noted that “week after week, this is perhaps the
silliest of all the silly hours on TV.” (December 18, 1972, page 67). The New York Times reviewer, O’Connor,
reported yawning “once or twice”
during the series, and that “Sometimes
the ghosts work. More often they don’t.”
The
pilot episode for Ghost Story , titled “The New House” (or “Pilot”) was based on
the English author Elizabeth Walter’s story She Cries , and it aired
originally not as part of the series proper, but earlier – on March 17, 1972 --
as the first hour of a two-hour special entitled Double Play . The second hour presented the pilot for the
Trucker series Movin’ On .
In
“The New House,” directed by John Llewelyn Moxey and adapted by Richard
Matheson, the Travis family moves into its newly constructed modern home, which
sits atop the peak of picturesque Pleasant Hill.
When expectant Eileen Travis (Barbara Perkins) begins hearing ghostly
noises at night, she grows convinced that the new home is haunted. She soon visits a local historian, De Witt
(Sam Jaffe), who tells her that her home is actually built over a two-hundred
year old gallows, the very spot where a defiant, unrepentant thief, Thomasina
Barrows (Allyn Ann McLerie) was hanged on March 2nd, 1779. Upon her death, she swore to one day return…
Disturbed
by her frequent night terrors, Eileen goes into labor and has a beautiful baby
girl. Things seem happy for a while,
until a dark night when Mr. Travis (David Birney) can’t seem to get home from work, and
Thomasina makes her ghostly presence known…
“The
New House” is an effective horror tale that, in some ways, reflects the
aesthetics of Rosemary’s Baby (1968).
Here we have another pregnant woman, spending her days alone, worrying about things. And in that state of anxiety, she encounters
the supernatural. Of course, from the
perspective of others, Eileen Travis seems unstable, and it’s easy to write off that
instability as a sign of her “condition.”
In
fairness, Mr. Travis is not evil, as Rosemary’s husband was in the classic Polanski
film, but he’s not very useful to have about., either He tries to patiently respond to his wife’s situation, but never
cares enough to stay home from work, for instance. Thus, Eileen’s feelings of isolation are
powerfully-wrought in the episode.
Some
of the visuals are nicely vetted too.
Eileen brings home a creepy statue at one point in the story, and when
she hears ghostly singing inside the house at night, the visuals suggest the statue is,
itself, vocalizing. There are also some
nice cockeyed pans across the exterior house, ones that suggest, in essence, that the house is off-balance, off-kilter.
The
punctuation of all the horror comes when the ghost of Thomasina Barrows appears
(in a thunderstorm, naturally), but we don’t see her face.
Instead, we observe a shadowy, still figure
in a long shot, at some distance from the camera. The Travis’s maid actually speaks to her,
believing she is speaking with Eileen, not a ghost. It’s a creepy, creepy moment as you come to realize
that the malevolent ghost is arranging to be alone in the house with Mrs. Travis
and her innocent baby.
“The
New House” also doesn’t fail in terms of commitment to the genre. Something diabolical and awful happens at
episode’s end regarding Thomasina’s encounter with Eileen and her daughter, and
Ghost Story doesn’t back down from it.
Although I didn’t see the episode when it originally aired (I would have
been three…) I can certainly imagine watching this pilot at night -- in the dark -- and
being creeped the hell out.
In
terms of series continuity, this first Ghost Story installment, introduces audiences to
Winston Essex, the “host” of Mansfield House. He’s quite different from other series hosts, namely the macabre Alfred
Hitchcock and the ironic Rod Serling.
Instead of taking on a tone of detachment or even black humor amusement,
Essex exhibits concern and sympathy for the characters in his plays. “I wish they weren’t going there,” he worries
for the Travis family, off to their new home on Pleasant Hill.
Also, Essex describes himself as a “devious dinosaur” and discusses
the incompatibility between Gothic tales and “the nuclear age.” In a real sense, that’s the terrain Ghost
Story wishes to tread.
The series hopes to
bridge the gap between modern reason and science, and our ancient, campfire
fears of ghosts and goblins. This idea
recurs several times throughout the short-lived series, and I'll be sure to bring it up again when it does.
Importantly, “The New House” sets its horror inside a modern house, one
that has never been lived in before. It
boasts all the modern conveniences of the 1970s, from telephones to dish
washers. And yet despite such comforts,
something terrifying and ancient – from an age past – infiltrates the family’s
life.
“The
New House” is well-written, scary, and effectively shot. The story is solid, if not revolutionary. In short, it’s a pretty good start for Ghost Story . Next week’s episode, however is a
real humdinger, and a work of horror television genius: “The Dead We Leave Behind.”
June 2, 2012
Saturday Morning Cult-TV Blogging: Ark II: "The Slaves" (September 18, 1976)
In
“The Slaves,” the Ark II team catches wind of a nearby village using slavery, a “miserable and immoral practice,” and
Jonah sets out to observe.
Unfortunately, he is captured by the forces of Baron Vargas (Michael
Kermoyan), a tyrant who deploys magic tricks to keep the slaves from attempting
escape, banding together, or asserting their rights.
In particular, Baron Vargas has convinced many
of his exhausted slaves that he possesses the power to turn people into mindless animals. The people, having no education or experience
with such thing, cower in fear. One man, Gideon, has even become an informant for Vargas, because he believes his sister has been transformed into an animal.
WhenJonah stands up to Vargas, the devious Baron stages a fire and light show in
which he appears to transform Jonah into a rooster. In truth, Jonah is simply put in prison,
abducted in a cloud of smoke, out of the eyes of the crowd.
Seeing
the deception for what it is, Ruth and Samuel at the Ark II decide to out-magic
the evil magician. They rescue Jonah,
and assert their own technological magic to free the slaves.
In
“The Slaves,” written by David Dworski, the audience gets to see a bit more of
the grand Ark II’s interesting capabilities.
In this case, the vehicle projects a force field beam; one that is able
to make it look like Jonah is actually walking on air. The force field beam looks dangerous, like a
laser, but like all of the Ark II’s devices is entirely defensive in nature.
Otherthan that touch, this episode, directed by Hollingsworth Morse, hammers home the
worthy point that fear stems from ignorance, and that knowledge can overcome
ignorance, and thus fear. The villager
slaves are all superstitious and terrified, but Jonah and his team pull back
the curtain, to use a Wizard of Oz metaphor, to reveal the
truth about the manipulative Vargas. It’s
a worthwhile point, especially because so many tyrants in today’s world use
ignorant beliefs (usually of a religious nature) to hold back their
populations.
Watching
this episode of Ark II , I understood, perhaps for the first time, what’s
missing from the series format: a sense
of how Ruth, Jonah and Samuel are educated and trained, and what kind of
organization, specifically they hail from.
What are their skill-sets? How
did they become trained?
It
would have been great if the makers of Ark II had provided a bit more
detail about these adventurers, and why they became involved with the Ark II
mission, and what skills, precisely, they bring to the table. It would have been neat to get an episode where
they check back in at home base, as well.
I
also got to wondering, perhaps because this episode is a little dull: is Ark II
the only vehicle in the fleet? Is there
also an Ark III or Ark IV out there, patrolling a different area?
Of
course, I realize that this Filmation series was designed for children. But the episodes create an interesting enough
world that as a viewer, you want to know more about the characters, their
backgrounds, and the world they inhabit. This is truly a series that would benefit from an intelligent remake: You could take the core series concept, the characters, the production design and the world-view and then spin out new details about all of them, significantly deepening the Ark II -iverse.
Next
week: “The Balloon.”
