Something Weird on TV: Tales to Keep You Awake Part Five – The Return

Between the final episode of the first season of Tales to Keep You Awake (June 24, 1966) and the first episode of the second season (October 20, 1967) more than a year had passed. Narciso Ibanez Serrador marks this gap in time in the opening of “The Nightmare” by introducing some of the behind-the-scenes crew who are returning to make these episodes possible. It’s one of the jokier and better introductions in the show so far, especially one particular gag involving the hands of the show’s sound mixer.

From there, season two takes off at a gallop. While Serrador may have previously stated his preference for the show’s melancholy science fiction pieces, I’m here for the gothic nonsense, and the second season packs plenty of it in. “The Nightmare” may be credited solely to Serrador, but it’s a loose riff on Tolstoy’s “The Family of the Vourdalak,” a tale famously adapted into one segment of Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath, not to mention the underseen Night of the Devils from 1972.

Here, as is often the case when Serrador adapts a story under his frequent pen name Luis Penafiel, some major deviations are taken that will help keep even fans of the story’s other adaptations on their toes, leading up to a double twist in the ending. Content warning, though, there is a cat who meets a rather unpleasant end in this episode.

“The Paw,” on the other hand, ends up exactly where the famous short story (W. W. Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw”) does, instead choosing to add its additional wrinkles to the beginning of the tale, showing the origins of the paw in question and hinting at some snake monsters that we never actually get to see. As is the case in the original story, the ending is achieved through implication rather than revelation, but remains effectively grisly, here as there.

Next up is “The Seer,” a thriller which finds the members of a parapsychology lab all falling victim to a baffling string of suicides. It includes a couple of relatively shocking off-screen deaths, and a very nice title treatment over a negative of Zener cards. It’s another episode that feels influenced by Nigel Kneale, though the actual screen credit comes from a writer named Juan Tebar, with Serrador once more handling the adaptation under his Penafiel pseudonym.

“The Return” is an EC Comics-style parable about revenge from beyond the grave (or is it?) in which two greedy relations plan to knock off their rich, cruel uncle, who claims to have dark magic powers. Again adapted by Serrador, it comes from a story by Fernando Jimenez del Oso, a distinctly saturnine-looking fellow who was a writer, psychiatrist, and journalist who, according to trivia on IMDb, was “the first person in Spain to talk of the supernatural in a TV program,” probably referring to his 1974 appearances on the show Everything is Possible on Sunday, where he talked about “mysteries and enigmas.” It is an episode that feels more like Tales From the Crypt than Tales to Keep You Awake

Del Oso also wrote numerous books on similar topics, with titles like The UFO Syndrome, Witches: The Devil’s Lovers, and The Enigma of the Andes, as well as editing a variety of books on the occult and the paranormal with titles like Basic Library of Occult Topics, Enigmas of Space and Time, and The Door of Mystery. Besides his TV appearances, he made frequent stops on the radio, and was the editor and founder of a magazine on the occult which kicked off in 1989.

Next up we’re back on familiar ground, this time once more tackling a story (or rather a poem) by Edgar Allan Poe. Prefiguring what Stuart Gordon would do decades later with “The Black Cat” episode of Masters of Horror, “The Raven” has as its protagonist none other than Poe himself, played in this case by Rafael Navarro, as it explores the tormented author’s final days before his death.

Unlike “The Black Cat,” however, “The Raven” doesn’t do much to weave in Poe’s writings, except for a recitation of the eponymous poem. Instead, it’s a fairly straightforward biography, taking as its focus the last days of Virginia Poe and Poe’s replacement as editor of Graham’s Magazine by Rufus Griswold (Luis Pena), who also acts as the narrator of the episode. An interesting episode of Tales to Keep You Awake for sure.

From a script by Serrador, “The Raven” takes some liberties with the specifics of Poe’s biography – despite their differences, Poe brought the poem of the title to Graham’s Magazine first, though they passed on it, and upon its publication it was an instant success, published in periodicals across the country – but is otherwise a straightforward and naturalistic tale. Indeed, Serrador himself warns us of as much in his introduction, which eschews the show’s usual gags.

In justifying why this is, Serrador says that the purpose of the jokey intros is to “slightly sweeten the bitter pill of terror that will follow.” Because this episode has no terror but is merely adjacent to it, no comic relief was required. Serrador also explains that the reason this episode is not a spooky one is because of its proximity to the Christmas holiday – it was originally broadcast on December 29, 1967. Depressing biography is apparently fine for the holidays, but terror, he says, is not.

With “The Promise,” we are back to gothic horror and back to cribbing from Poe, at least thematically, with this story of an undertaker who lives in mortal fear of being buried alive. The twists this time around are pretty inevitable, but they’re handled well, and the whole thing feels like a shorthand (and black-and-white) version of one of Roger Corman’s Poe films.

“The House” continues the high gothic tone, complete with plenty of dark and stormy nights, and a guy inheriting a possibly haunted domicile where the ghost of the former lady of the house is said to seduce handsome men like him and take them “to the grave.” There’s lots of people passing on ominous warnings and lots of dusty atmosphere, as well as an odd comic relief pilgrim and his equally odd theme music.

Decades before Repo! The Genetic Opera, there was “The Transplant,” the unlikely final episode of the second season of Tales to Keep You Awake, about a future in which transplants are so commonplace that not having them makes one an outsider. “The Transplant” also features the return of the weird stylistic choices that defined “The Asphalt” at the end of the first season.

It would be tempting to say that these are the strangest parts of the episode, until people start singing.

That’s it for season two but not quite it for Tales to Keep You Awake. Next month, we make the leap into color – and also quite a bit into the future – to catch the handful of remaining episodes, separated by literal decades.