Something Weird on TV: Tales to Keep You Awake Part One – The Intro

In 1966, there was not a lot of horror coming out of Spain’s film industry, and not much on their television stations, either. But Narciso Ibanez Serrador was set to change all that. In 1962, he helped to launch a science fiction series whose title translates roughly to “Tomorrow It May Be True,” but it was the 1966 debut of Historias para no dormir – Tales to Keep You Awake – that truly began Serrador’s ascension to stardom.

As Hitchcock had in Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Rod Serling had in The Twilight Zone, Serrador introduced the episodes himself, appearing in jokey mise en scenes before each installment. And while the episodes were often drawn from the works of legendary writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Ray Bradbury, and others, the screen treatments were frequently penned and directed by Serrador himself.

The success of the series helped to push Serrador to a kind of stardom in his native Spain rarely encountered by directors and showrunners. While he would produce several other TV series, he solidified his claim to international fame just a few years later when he helmed The House That Screamed, which is often considered Spain’s first horror film.

Before then, though, he was already keeping viewers awake with the chilling tales collected in this TV series, which were filmed in black-and-white and, after the first episode, on video. In the introduction to the unusually short pilot episode, Serrador opens with some suitably gothic trappings, including a self-consciously fake spider, before then decrying those – “That’s not going to scare anybody” – and apologizing for the show’s relative lack of production values.

He also puts forth something of a mission statement, suggesting that the episodes that are to follow will largely eschew the cliches of horror, including sinister butlers, gothic castles, and dark and stormy nights. And, for the first few episodes, at least, he’s true to his word. The pilot is adapted from a story by pulp author Fredric Brown, who may be best known for the short story “Arena,” which was loosely adapted into a 1967 episode of Star Trek.

“The Birthday” features almost no dialogue, instead consisting primarily of voiceover narration from an unnamed man (Rafael Navarro) who plans to murder his wife and rob the bank where he works on his 50th birthday. At only about 12 minutes, it’s a solid enough nail-biter, even if the ending feels pleasantly inevitable to us now.

The second episode of Tales to Keep You Awake is something of an oddity, though not one that we haven’t been warned about. In the introduction to the first episode, Serrador cautioned that the original segments would occasionally be broken up by ones from other countries, in case a weekly broadcast was otherwise impossible because it took too long “for us to build our monsters and Martians.” The episode titled “The Hand” is the first of these.

“The Hand” is the infamous Outer Limits episode “Demon with a Glass Hand,” originally aired in 1964 and simply dubbed into Spanish here. Even the episode’s original closing narration has been retained (albeit translated), though the opening narration is missing.

For those who are unfamiliar, “Demon with a Glass Hand” was written by Harlan Ellison and is often reported as the source of a plagiarism settlement that Ellison received from the creators of The Terminator. Ellison himself has since clarified that the episode in question was actually another that he wrote for Outer Limits, simply called “Soldier.”

Either way, “Demon with a Glass Hand” is a fairly familiar episode, even for those who have never seen it. A man with no memory confronts human-looking aliens inside LA’s famous Bradbury Building. The man has a computer for a hand, which is missing three of its fingers and therefore cannot fully function, and both he and the aliens are there from the future, where the aliens and humans are at war.

Despite the time travel hijinks and its apocryphal association with the Terminator settlement, the more obvious influence of “Demon with a Glass Hand” was on Blade Runner, which also had a major scene set in the Bradbury Building and borrowed some of this story’s themes as well as the kohl-eyed look of its aliens.

All of this means that we don’t get the first real episode of Tales to Keep You Awake until our third installment, which opens with Serrador in the kitchen whipping up what looks to be an omelet. It, too, is an oddity, however, as it is one of only a couple of stories throughout the series that is broken up into two parts. Here called “La Bodega” or “The Cellar,” the episodic diptych is adapted from the Ray Bradbury short story “Come Into My Cellar,” which is also sometimes known by the more bombastic title, “Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar!”

If you don’t know the story (which was also adapted to the screen as an episode of The Ray Bradbury Theater in 1989), you may already be able to guess a little of what it’s about from that latter title. Set in the suburbs of the United States, it follows the father of a boy who gets a package from mail order that lets him start growing mushrooms in his basement, which he plans to sell. That the mushrooms have a sinister significance should not be too surprising, given the nature of the show.

Since this is the first time that Serrador has gotten to helm a full-length (even extra-length) episode of this series, it’s a nice showpiece for him and, hopefully, a taste of what we can expect in the future. Bradbury’s story is given room to breathe and a respectful adaptation, and as a connoisseur of fungal horror, the scenes of the mushrooms themselves are exquisite.

Many aficionados of weird stuff on TV are probably already familiar with the various American genre shows that were filling the airwaves in the ‘60s, from aforementioned examples such as Twilight Zone and Outer Limits to Thriller, hosted by Boris Karloff. For those outside Spain, however, Tales to Keep You Awake is likely more seldom seen.

Fortunately, Severin recently released a tremendous Blu-ray of the entire series, and here at Signal Horizon, we’re excited to take you on a deep dive into it for the next few months. And then, after that, stay tuned, because we’ll also be checking out some other anthology horror series from across the pond in the second half of the year…