Something Weird on TV: Tales to Keep You Awake Part Two – The Master

“The biggest star of the horror genre is, without a doubt, Edgar Allan Poe,” Narciso Ibanez Serrador says in his introduction to the fifth episode of Tales to Keep You Awake, which is also the first of several adapted from a story by Poe. “And Poe just had to be in our program,” Serrador continues, “for if there ever was a writer who stole the sleep of his readers, it was Edgar Allan Poe.”

Which particular Poe tale is being adapted in the episode entitled “The Cask” is probably pretty obvious from the jump, but you’d be forgiven for not recognizing it otherwise. Where “The Cask of Amontillado” is a fairly simple story of disproportionate revenge for a perceived insult, set in Italy during carnival, this episode moves the action to the French countryside, to a small town in Burgundy that makes its living from the neighboring vineyards.

A traveling peddler has arrived in town to trade his wares for wine, and he takes a room with one of the most prosperous winemakers in the region, played by Antonio Casas, who was also in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Sound of Horror. The winemaker has a beautiful young wife who is dissatisfied with his company and with the provincial lifestyle he leads, and the dashing and silver-tongued peddler woos her in short order. The inevitable cask and its accompanying interment is a result of this liaison, and the added element of the murdered wife makes the denouement more grisly than is usual for variations on this particular tale.

By this time, cinematic and even television adaptations of Poe were nothing new. Indeed, he may be the most adapted writer of all time, with over 400 credits on IMDb, going back as far as 1908. As it happens, one of the earliest is an uncredited short film adaptation of this same story, dating to 1909. And any aficionado of Poe cinema can tell you that very few of those hundreds and hundreds of adaptations are particularly faithful, so the license taken by the writers and filmmakers at Tales to Keep You Awake should not come as any surprise and, indeed, in the case of “The Cask,” they amount to one of the better takes on the material ever produced for film or TV.

As he introduces the next episode, a short gangster story written by Serrador under his frequent pen name Luis Penafiel, Serrador points out the fact that his jokey little introductions are nothing new, mentioning that Hitchcock had introduced all of his own shows the same way. He then addresses some letters ostensibly received from the audience, which complain that the series isn’t scary enough, and ask “why there isn’t more horror and darkness in our show.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Serrador replies, “the answer is simple. Television is a spectacle for the masses, therefore, what we offer can never be too extreme.” He then goes on to revisit some comments he made before the first episode, that they “aren’t just aiming to have a terrorific impact, but offer a dose of quality” and, therefore, if their “murders are not as murderous, and our Martian monsters are not as monstrous,” hopefully they will still manage to “enthuse you and sometimes even unsettle you,” and, if they have, “well, we’ll have done what we set out to do.”

The joke in this introduction is mainly that he has spent all this time discussing horror, only to introduce what might be the series’ least horrific story to date. “The Offer” is basically a one-man show for Carlos Larranaga, a man delivering a monologue to a silent audience about how he has everything, and therefore they can offer him nothing. The monologue is interspersed with occasional clips showing the gangster’s rotten dealings, but for the most part it’s just him in a darkened room, talking to the camera, and it’s a credit to Larranaga that this is never boring.

“The Double” sees Tales to Keep You Awake returning already to the well of Bradbury, this time producing a fairly faithful adaptation of the 1949 story “Marionettes, Inc.” What makes this episode particularly wild is that it was no less than the fourth time that same story had been adapted to either radio or the small screen, with previous takes on the material showing up in episodes of the radio programs Dimension X in 1951 and X Minus One in 1955, as well as a 1958 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, under the title “Design for Loving.”

While “The Double” is technically one of the series’ occasional science fiction stories, with its premise of robot duplicates, Serrador’s direction and the subdued subject matter give the episode a noirish sense of menace that works wonderfully. It’s also amusing that the episode is canonically set in the “future” of 1983.

“The Pact,” meanwhile, is the show’s second Edgar Allan Poe episode, and the first of many to star prolific Spanish actor Narciso Ibanez Menta, who was already a big enough name that he gets talked up in the episode’s introduction. Here, Menta plays a character named Dr. Eckstrom, standing in for the unnamed mesmerist narrator of Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” from which the episode is adapted.

As with “The Cask,” the showrunners take some serious liberties with the text, mostly for the good. In this case, they add a relatively shocking backstory to support the events of the Valdemar segment of the tale, and the episode’s final reveal is suitably grisly for what is, after all, one of Poe’s goriest tales.

What is perhaps most interesting about “The Pact” is that Menta had previously played the same character, with the same name, in the same story, in a 1960 film called Masterworks of Terror which, itself, seems like it might have been a patch-up job done from episodes of a TV series of the same name. Is it possible that “The Pact” is just a reproduction of that segment, as “The Hand” was earlier in the series?

Tracking down Masterworks of Terror online (in Spanish, without subtitles), the answer is clearly no. But it leaves us with more questions and not just about this episode. You see, while the segment from Masterworks of Terror and this episode of Tales to Keep You Awake aren’t the same, their structure is more or less identical, implying that “The Pact” was, in fact, a remake of this segment, using at least one of the same actors.

Here’s where it gets weirder, though. There are three segments in Masterworks of Terror, all of them adapted from Edgar Allan Poe stories. One of the others is an adaptation of “The Cask of Amontillado,” which follows almost exactly the plot of the Tales to Keep You Awake episode, “The Cask.” None of this should be too shocking to us, however, as the writer for all three segments of Masterworks of Terror was none other than Narciso Ibanez Serrador himself.

What’s the third segment in the film? An adaptation of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” And who knows, perhaps we’ll be seeing a new version of it later in the series…