Something Weird on TV: Tales to Keep You Awake Part Three – The Story

“The Doll” is a fairly good example of how the writing in Tales to Keep You Awake seems to work, being adapted from not one but two different sources, one by Henry James (The Turn of the Screw) and the other by Robert Bloch (“Sweets to the Sweet,” which was also adapted into a segment of The House That Dripped Blood in 1971).

Another in a long string of episodes starring Narciso Ibanez Menta – as will be most of the ones we’ll be discussing tonight – “The Doll” is a gothic period piece set in the London of 1924, about a man whose young daughter may be practicing witchcraft. Menta plays the father, while the daughter is played by Teresa Hurtado, who would later appear in Narciso Ibanez Serrador’s legendary horror film The House That Screamed.

Told as a series of nested monologues before we ever get to the meat of the tale, “The Doll” showcases some of the series’ best writing, even if it makes some major deviations from the stories it’s adapting. It also showcases something else – that the film elements being restored here are not always in the best of shape, which leads segments of this episode to look scratchier or more faded than some others, or to lose sound in brief snippets.

Serrador’s introduction to the next episode is possibly the first one in the series that isn’t a joke. Instead, he sets out an apology that we’re not about to watch anything spooky, promising that we’ll get back to normal the following week. In explaining his reasoning, he offers a confession: “In all honesty, horror scripts are not my preference,” he says. “I do them because I know there’s a huge fan base of thrill seekers and I myself, as a viewer, do enjoy them.”

What he would rather write, he says, are stories like “The Rocket,” a gentle tale adapted from the Ray Bradbury story of the same name. It’s far from the first time that Bradbury has appeared in the bylines of an episode of Tales to Keep You Awake, but this time he gets an introduction from Serrador, who says that, as Bradbury got older, he “ceased to be a novelist and became a poet.”

Set in the distant future of 2019, “The Rocket” is the tale of a junkyard owner who dreams of taking his family into space – and fulfills that dream, at least after a fashion, in an unlikely manner. As has been the case with several other stories in Tales to Keep You Awake, this is by no means the first time that “The Rocket” has been adapted to some other medium than prose. It appeared as a radio play and an episode of CBS Television Workshop in 1952, in comics in 1953, and was the partial inspiration for the 2006 movie The Astronaut Farmer, starring Billy Bob Thornton and Bruce Willis.

“The Rocket” is followed up by “The Joke,” an episode from an original story, rather than an adaptation, that sees Menta once again in the starring role, this time as a television producer who loves to play practical jokes. When his wife and his secretary – who are having an affair behind his back – decide to knock him off, he manages to play one last joke on them, from beyond the grave.

It is, as you might expect, a fairly light episode, but Menta gets some dynamite moments and it ends with a suitably morbid Tales from the Crypt-esque comeuppance for the two murderers. While “The Joke” focuses on its grisly humor, Serrador’s introduction contains no joke. Instead, he talks about how humor and horror are often strange bedfellows.

There’s no joke at the beginning of “The Cabin,” either, with Serrador devoting his opening to introducing the episode’s screenwriters, newcomers to the show in the form of Alejandro Garcia Planas, “a well-known writer for press and radio” whose only IMDb credit is this episode of Tales to Keep You Awake, and Antonio Cotanda, of whom the same is true, even if Serrador introduces him as a screenwriter. Their story, Serrador claims, is based on “a strange and amazing drama that took place in the Pyrenees, in Lerida, in February 1928.” In spite of the specificity of those details, I was unable to find any indication of the supposed true story on which this episode is ostensibly based.

The episode itself is a two-person, single-location yarn about two women who become trapped in an isolated mountain cabin by a snowstorm. One of them is wracked with fear that her ex will somehow find her there and exact his revenge. She also suffers from catalepsy and, like anyone who suffers from catalepsy in a horror story, is terrified of being buried alive.

We’ll be closing out tonight’s coverage of Tales to Keep You Awake with another crime episode, “The Anniversary.” It opens as a retired police officer is celebrating the one-year anniversary of his retirement with his daughter, her boyfriend, and his neighbor. However, the daughter’s boyfriend has a secret in this Hitchcockian “bomb under the table” episode, which makes up for the last few by kicking off with the jokiest intro we’ve had in a while, as Narciso Ibanez Serrador opens the show’s mail.

That’s it for tonight, but be sure to join us again next month, which should see us finishing out the first season of Tales to Keep You Awake with several more science fiction episodes as well as some other surprises.