Night
Gallery and Twilight
Zone creator Rod Serling once complained to the press that the Powers
That Be at Universal wanted to transform his 1970s horror TV series into “Mannix in a cemetery.”
In
other words, as the celebrated writer noted, “you don’t walk past a cemetery…you get chased.”
Ghost Story’s “Elegy for A Vampire” is a showcase for the very brand of mind-numbing creative thinking Mr. Serling despised in his famous remark. There are at least three chases – in a cemetery – in this interminable episode of the William Castle horror anthology. And those are, not surprisingly, the episode’s best parts.
In
“Elegy for a Vampire,” our host at Mansfield House, Winston Essex (Sebastian
Cabot) discusses a professor he once knew, Pendergast, who believed in “life after and death” and wrote about
the plight of the “modern day vampire.”
As
the story proper commences, we meet tortured David Wells (Hal Linden), a
college professor who is editing one of Pendergast’s texts and is, well, a
vampire, himself.
Only
in this case, vampirism is described as a biological need for blood caused by a
chemical balance. That description
actually seems interesting, not to mention innovative for 1972. There’s something to be said for this
interpretation of Wells’ vampire as a coked-up addict, his hands shaking and
his face sweaty as he grows desperate and in need of his next fix.
Unfortunately,
the episode by Mark Weingart doesn’t choose to linger on the lone promising
idea in the slow-moving, torturous, confused teleplay. Instead, the focus is firmly on a series of
murders on the college campus (bordering a cemetery…) where Wells teaches, and worse,
his budding romance with a visiting woman named Laura Benton (Marlyn Mason).
So
instead of focusing on the particular nature of this tortured vampire, we get night
chase after night chase, and then the endless bureaucratic meetings of campus
security personnel (!), as faculty and staff wonder what’s to be done to stop
the mad killer.
Incredibly,
“Elegy for a Vampire” attempts to drum up a mystery too, when the teleplay
suggests that Pendergast didn’t actually die…and that he is actually the offending
vampire himself. The only problem with this
blatant avenue of red-herring-ism is that the episode very clearly dramatizes –
time and again -- that Wells himself
is the vampire during the chases. We get
ridiculous, extreme close-ups of Linden’s tortured eyes as a dark shadow falls
over cowering co-eds. There’s no
question that he’s the perp.
I
love horror and cult television, obviously, but gee whiz, the teleplay here is
just god-awful. In voice-over narration,
David reads from his journal and asks “am
I a murderer? I can’t be sure.”
Sorry
David, the audience is sure!
We
see David stalk and kill victims at least twice near the inevitable cemetery. Accordingly, the episode boasts no suspense or
mystery whatsoever. So why the Hell does it waste time trying to divert our attention away
from David at the same time it showcases David doing the killings?
This
is called padding, folks. The whole hour
is padding.
Finally,
at the end of the episode, upon his apparent death, David declares “Thank God it’s over.”
You
will feel exactly the same way.
This
is the very worst episode of Ghost Story thus far, and that’s really
saying something. At this point, the
series is perilously close to coming out a wash, with as many bad episodes as good ones. Here’s the tally, per my reviews. And
yes, I’m cheating a little by putting “Bad Connection” into the category of “good”
instead of “average” or “guilty pleasure.”
Good Bad
“The
New House” “The
Concrete Captain”
“The
Dead We Leave Behind” “The
Summer House”
“At
the Cradle Foot” “Half-A-Death”
“Bad
Connection” “Cry
of the Cat”
“Alter
Ego” “Elegy
for a Vampire”
“House
of Evil” ?
Next
week: “Touch of Madness” determines if Ghost Story/Circle of Fear is
batting 50/50.
John good review of Ghost Story “Elegy for a Vampire”, it seemed like a better episode to me when I saw it as a young boy in 1972. However, now it is obvious that the vampire element kept me interested back then. As you stated, Rod Serling’s Night Gallery was being corrupted by the network too. This episode proves also that Ghost Story/Circle Of Fear should have been a half hour anthology series so the scripts would not have needed to be padded out. This story desperately needed a Carl Kolchak intervention, his voice-over always added to the story, not detracted like this episode. Good idea with the score list on good v. bad episodes, so far.
ReplyDeleteSGB
I just re-watched this episode again, and have to agree that it's definitely inferior, though maybe because of the cemetary/vampire angle, I found it at least more engaging than that bore-fest "Cry of the Cat" (which I would have to rate as the "bottom-of-the-barrel")
ReplyDelete"Elegy" was not only badly padded, but as you mention, went off in wrong directions. The idea of a modern day "vampire" who needs blood, but doesn't exhibit any of the standard mythology of vampires (can't stand sunlight, needs to sleep in coffin, etc) was fairly intriguing, Even the angle that, Mr. Hyde-like, the Hal Linden character couldn't remember his crimes afterwards, and was tortured by the possibility of being a blood-thirsty murderer, had potential. But then we get a boring police-piece about catching the murderer.
And I still can't figure out just what was with both the Arthur O'Connell and Mike Farrell characters convinced they'd seen the late Professor Pendergast? To the extent that they even dig up his grave and stake his corpse? This was not only a red-herring, but a loose-end, since it was never revealed WHY they both saw the elderly professor, instead of the young Linden. As for the "shocker" ending, when on the train Linden rises from his coffin, I figured that was gonna happen as soon as the Marlyn Mason character just HAD to accompany his body back home on the train. Anyways, this episode is a great case of a descent premise being utterly ruined when the script was developed.