Few things are as sad as horror lost to time. The crowning example of this is Tod Browning’s 1927 London After Midnight, the last known copy of which was destroyed in the 1965 MGM vault fire. It was a silent horror-whodunit film about an old murder and the possibility vampires were involved. It’s become its own myth, essentially, because of the few things that survive from it. For instance, pictures of Lon Chaney donning a cloak, a top hat, and a wide serrated smile are plentiful and they point to the creation of a uniquely terrifying creature (which became iconic despite the circumstances). Unfortunately, they can only offer a hint as to the frightful delights that we were denied. In cases such as these, the mind invites the darkest kind of imagination to try and put together the pieces that aren’t there. In terms of horror specifically, what we imagine is fear of the highest order.
England has its own lost terrors, but none as painful or tragic as the BBC’s first horror series shot in color: Late Night Horror. The series ran over six 25-minute episodes during 1968, and they were each cut from the same grand guignol cloth that would later enamor storytellers such as Robert Bloch (Psycho), William Castle (House on Haunted Hill), and Alfred Hitchcock (Psycho movie adaptation, Rebecca).
Like many other UK horror anthologies (most notably A Ghost Story for Christmas), Late Night Horror consisted of short story adaptations. These ranged from some of literature’s best, with Robert Aickman, Roald Dahl, and Arthur Conan Doyle among them. What’s more impressive, though, is that the series featured two trailblazing women directors among its creative team, Paddy Russell and Naomi Capon, both of which faced all of the sexism and mistreatment we’ve come to expect whenever female pioneers claim their space in male-dominated spaces.
Everything was lined up for a series that would go on to live in reruns and retrospectives that celebrated not just its daring nature but the women that contributed to it. Unfortunately, the horror that was made manifest in those six episodes would inspire viewers and morality advocates to lodge complaints against the BBC for showing such macabre imagery on television. Those complaints led to its demise. Shortly thereafter, so the story goes, the tapes the episodes were recorded on were wiped, with other programs occupying them. And thus, an important part of horror history was cast into oblivion.
And then, 2016 came about and provided us with a splendidly sinister little miracle. Fellow vintage TV collectors Chris Perry and Richard Down saw an ad in a 1980s media catalogue that offered a single episode from the infamous series, albeit in black and white. The episode’s name was “The Corpse Can’t Play,” a particularly nasty tale regarded by many as the best of the six (though “The Bells of Hell” is often seen competing for that top spot).
The episode, adapted from John Burke’s short story “Party Games,” centers on a boy’s birthday party. The boy in question is a textbook bully. All his friends are there and they’re only there to play the games he wants to play. Then, a sad boy that wasn’t invited to the party arrives. The bullish kid sees an opportunity to get a fair bit of tormenting in on his special day. And then the party games start getting stranger, and crueler.
Director Paddy Russell takes aim at the ugliness of the privileged in British culture. The chaos of the party is representative of this, especially in how it devolves into a mess of screams and laughter that bears down on the adults that have taken refuge in the kitchen area. They’re resigned to the fact they have little to no authority over them, hinting at a deeper problem concerning parenting and the consequences of spoiling kids beyond the point of no return. That the party so swiftly descends into cruelty after the uninvited boy arrives further cements this. Entitlement becomes one of the monsters of the story, and it’s responded to in kind in a clever and satisfying way.
The existence of “The Corpse Can’t Play” only makes the case of Late Night Terror more enticing. It suggests that a different more potent strain of horror was captured in the remaining five episodes, and that they held the power to become timeless. That said, what we come up with in the absence of the source material is bound to be scarier and more terrible than the real thing. The mind doesn’t settle for whatever’s reasonable. It populates emptiness with a wondrous but often exaggerated sense of possibility. The good thing about this, though, is that mystery keeps memory alive. It makes us hold out some hope that we’ll get another dark blessing in the form of a lost episode that’s maybe hidden in an attic somewhere. While we wait for that to happen, we’ll just have to make do with whatever our disturbed imaginations can come up with.
