Cult-TV Theme Watch: Photographs

There is an old superstition that a photograph can capture the soul of its subject, and if anything, cult television has capitalized on this spooky aspect of the art of photography.  

The medium has featured bogeymen that live inside photographs, cameras that reflect madness, and other strange aspects of the human and inhuman world.  

In cult-television, photographs aren’t merely keepsakes or memories of times past…they are the key to mystery and horror.

In The Twilight Zone’s (1959 – 1964) “A Most Unusual Camera” by Rod Serling, for instance, a husband and wife team of thieves discover a camera at a curio shop that can take photographs of the future. 

They erroneously believe this camera offers a great way to predict outcomes of sporting events and get rich, but soon the photographs reveal a personal future of a very unpleasant variety…

In Rod Serling’s The Night Gallery (1969 – 1973), “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” involves a photographer who believes he has the perfect model (Joanna Pettet) for a client’s advertisements and bill board promotions.  

The only problem was that this compelling, mysterious woman isn’t quite human, and in, fact devilishly murderous.  To destroy this vampire-like being, the photographer must destroy all his own photographs, thus destroying his own artistic work at the same time that he destroys her powerful image.

Sapphire and Steel’s (1978 -1981) fourth serial, unofficially called “The Man without a Face” deals specifically with a malevolent life form that exists inside every photograph ever taken, all across human history.  

This monster escapes from the world of photographs into our own, with horrible and terrifying effect.  At one point, Sapphire (Joanna Lumley) and Steel (David McCallum) become captured inside the confines of a photograph themselves and the Man with No Face plans to burn it…destroying them forever.  

At the end, the monster is vanquished, but he warns “I’ll find [another] photograph…nothing lasts but me.”

The X-Files (1992 – 2002) deals with spooky photographs on at least two memorable occasions.  In “Unruhe,” Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Mulder (David Duchovny) hunt a predator whose madness seemed to “imprint” itself on the passport photos of his would-be victims.   The photographs his insanity produce are deeply disturbing, featuring screaming victims, and spectral “howlers.”

And in the sixth season’s “Tithonus,” Mulder and Scully encounter a crime scene photographer named Alfred Pfellig (Geoffrey Lewis) who always seems to know where to find the action…often before the next crime even occurs.

In the short-lived UPN series Nowhere Man (1995), the program’s very concept revolves around a photograph, one called “Hidden Agenda.”  The nature and subjects of this photograph cause photojournalist Thomas Veil (Bruce Greenwood) no end of trouble.  

Those seeking the photo’s destruction set out to erase Veil form history itself.  He loses his wife, his identity, everything…all because the Forces that Be want the photograph suppressed.

In some cases in cult-tv history, photographs have served a more mundane purpose, acting as important visual reminders of important character losses.  

A photograph of Dr. Helena Russell’s (Barbara Bain) presumed-dead husband Lee Russell appears in the early Space: 1999 (1975 – 1977) episode “Matter of Life and Death,” and a photograph of Buck’s lost love, Jennifer appears in the Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century (1979 – 1981) episode “A Dream of Jennifer.”