Something Weird on TV: Tales to Keep You Awake Part Six – The Climax

The final episode of the second season of Tales to Keep You Awake aired on March 15, 1968. After that, Narciso Ibanez Serrador’s show was absent from screens for half a decade, returning for a brief one-off called “The Television” which appeared on July 5, 1974. In the six years that had elapsed, one big change had taken place: color!

As the first installment of Tales to Keep You Awake to be released in color, it only makes sense that “The Television” would be about nothing less than a color TV. In this case, a color TV that has been the dream of a man (once again played by series regular Narciso Ibanez Menta) for many years. The results quickly transition from wholesome to tragic.

Checking around online will find plenty of people reading “The Television” as a screed against excessive media consumption – an interpretation that is certainly borne out by the episode’s last-minute twist. However, for much of its running time, “The Television” is probably more profitably read as a metaphor for addiction, or for living with a loved one who is experiencing dementia, memory loss, or untreated mental illness.

It can also be interpreted in other ways. As a cautionary tale about dreams deferred – perhaps you shouldn’t put yourself last for too long, lest the floodgates, when finally opened, wash away everything else. Even as a satire of the ridiculousness of the fearmongering about violence on television, something that Serrador himself must have had to endure while pioneering a horror-based anthology series. This last reading is also borne out by the episode’s conclusion.

Though retroactively incorporated into the series during its revival in the 1980s, “The Television” was originally released as a standalone TV movie. It wasn’t until nearly another decade later that the series proper returned to the airwaves with the 1982 release of the feature-length episode “Freddy.” Widely considered one of the show’s best, “Freddy” is a subdued Spanish giallo about a touring variety show company that becomes embroiled in murderous shenanigans while staying at a hotel on their first night on the road.

“With this story, we purposefully set out to pay tribute to cliché,” Serrador says in his lengthy introduction to the episode. He’s talking about things like fake-out scares and sinister red herrings, but he could just as easily be alluding to the story’s subject matter which, among other things, takes a stab (no pun intended) at the trope of the ventriloquist dummy that may or may not be more than it seems.

When I say that “Freddy” is feature-length, I’m not exaggerating. As the longest episode of the entire series, “Freddy” clocks in just shy of two full hours and, honestly, it probably didn’t need all of that time. It’s a very good episode – it might genuinely be the best in the series – but it’s also a slow one, and some of its stalking scenes are laborious. It would probably be a better movie if ten minutes had been shaved here and there to tighten things up and get us to its jaw-dropping finale faster.

In 2021, the series was briefly brought back (without most of the original contributors, of course) for a short four-episode run that remade several of the original episodes. As a favorite from the original series, “Freddy” was a natural fit for one of those.

And speaking of rehashes, Tales to Keep You Awake wasn’t above going back to the same well now and again, even back in 1982, and the second episode of the third season is a color remake of “The Pact” from season one, in this case bringing back a variation on Poe’s original title, “The Case of Mr. Valdemar.”

Not merely another take on the same material, however, this is literally the same show, using pretty much the same script, with the same actors reprising the same roles, just filmed again almost twenty years later. Despite that familiarity, it doesn’t lose its punch, and Serrador makes good use of the color he now has available to him, in addition to ramping up the gooeyness of the final reveal.

For those who don’t remember our coverage of “The Pact,” the wild thing is that this is actually the third time this same script has been used to make this same episode using some of the same actors, as that installment was, itself, a do-over of a segment of the 1960 film Masterworks of Terror, also starring Menta in the lead role. (Masterworks of Terror may itself have been a patch-up job from earlier sources, my research on that has remained inconclusive.)

The second-to-last episode of Tales to Keep You Awake is another trip back to an old well, but this time it’s not a previous episode of Tales but rather a remake of Serrador’s earlier sci-fi anthology series, Tomorrow It May Be True. Which might explain why both the ideas and the twist of “The End Began Yesterday” feel familiar, even for those who have never seen that show.

Another alien invasion episode, this is the last science fiction installment in the series. Though the road to get to the big reveal (as foreshadowed in the episode’s opening) is more than a bit meandering, the atmosphere here is good, showcasing Serrador’s skill as a director in drawing tension and interest out of even fairly mundane material. Unlike the rest of season three, Narciso Ibanez Menta is absent from this episode – at least, mostly.

In the lengthy and somewhat belabored introduction, Serrador sits down with another actor to discuss his father’s legacy. This is, I believe, the first time that the series has made direct reference to the fact that Narciso Ibanez Menta, by far the most common recurring performer on the show, is, in fact, showrunner Serrador’s father. As they look through photos of Menta in other performances (I want to see the one where he was burnt by acid!) and reminisce, Serrador eventually pulls out another revelation… that his father’s greatest role was in pretending to be human, as a squat, comical Martian, speaking with Menta’s voice, comes out to visit his son and see his grandchildren.

That only leaves us with “The Junkman,” the final episode of Tales to Keep You Awake and a fitting – if bittersweet – sendoff to this distinctive Spanish horror series. Menta is back in the lead and the series is once more returning to the Poe well it has drawn from so successfully in the past, this time taking very liberal inspiration from Poe’s 1835 story “Berenice.”

While the twist in “The Junkman” may be inevitable, the road to get there is still one of the better in the series, with an unrelentingly oppressive atmosphere. Between this, the remake of “The Pact,” and “Freddy,” Tales to Keep You Awake chose to go out on some of its strongest notes.

Unfortunately, with the exception of the aforementioned 2021 revival, that’s the end of Tales to Keep You Awake. Because the revival isn’t part of the original series and isn’t included in the Blu-ray set from Severin (and because I couldn’t find it anywhere to watch with subtitles) we won’t be covering it here. Not to worry, though. We’re not going anywhere just yet, and we’ll be back next month with another Something Weird on TV as we explore Nigel Kneale’s 1976 series Beasts.