In the late 1950s, Rod Serling was trying to write politically charged stories for the screen, to reflect the fraught political climate of the United States, but found that no network would air them. If he wrote a straightforward TV drama about a hot-button issue like the murder of Emmett Till, then censors and advertisers and network executives would immediately worry about alienating viewers or sparking controversy.
Then, Serling came up with an ingenious workaround. If he couldn’t just dramatize these political topics, then he could allegorize them through sci-fi and horror stories. He couldn’t just write a story about an American neighborhood coming together to out the communist sympathizer in their midst, but he could write a story about those neighbors trying to identify an alien impostor on their street, and leave the audience to connect the dots.
The Twilight Zone remains one of the greatest TV shows ever made, and a timeless social commentary. Since the allegories are nonspecific, they still hold up today. McCarthyism isn’t a thing anymore, but kneejerk reactions to Americans’ political views are still rampant. All these years later, I’d argue that The Twilight Zone is still the gold standard when it comes to horror on television. But Stephen King has a different choice.
Boris Karloff’s Thriller Is A Forgotten Masterpiece Of TV Horror
In the wake of The Twilight Zone’s success, we saw a bunch of copycats. Every producer in Hollywood tried their hand at a Twilight Zone-style horror anthology series, with varying degrees of success. We saw The Outer Limits, Tales from the Crypt, Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Hammer House of Horror — this genre took over the airwaves for a few years.
In 1960, in the immediate aftermath of The Twilight Zone’s arrival, NBC premiered its own horror anthology, Thriller, with its own iconic presenter: Boris Karloff, best known for playing Frankenstein’s monster in the Universal franchise. Thriller told all kinds of standalone stories under the banner of the titular genre, ranging from grounded suspense stories to twisted tales of the supernatural, so there was a nice variety of tone and subject matter.
Much like The Twilight Zone, the anthology nature of Thriller allowed it to attract plenty of A-list guest stars: William Shatner, Mary Tyler Moore, Bruce Dern — Frank Drebin himself, Leslie Nielsen, appeared in the first episode (back when he was a straight dramatic actor, not a subversive comedic actor). Thriller was ultimately cut short when Alfred Hitchcock Presents hijacked its timeslot, but it remains a beloved classic.
Rather than relying on gore and shock value, Thriller used all the old-school techniques to build tension and put the audience on the edge of their seats. Jerry Goldsmith’s music is genuinely unnerving, and the black-and-white format gave way to some frightfully shadowy images.
Stephen King Prefers Thriller To The Twilight Zone
According to the King of Horror himself, Thriller isn’t just a worthy cousin to The Twilight Zone; it’s the superior show. In 1981, King took a break from churning out horror novels to write a nonfiction book about the horror genre itself titled Danse Macabre. One of the many bold claims in the book is that Thriller is “the best horror series ever put on television,” clearly throwing shade at The Twilight Zone.
King has often said that he doesn’t consider the books he writes to be horror novels, but rather suspense novels, so it makes sense that he would gravitate towards the anthology that peddles in traditional suspense stories as opposed to the more horror-centric one. The Twilight Zone is a masterpiece (and for what it’s worth, I disagree with King; I think it’s better than Thriller), but Thriller never had an episode resorting to the body horror of pig-faced doctors.
Source: Danse Macabre
Thriller
- Release Date
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1960 – 1962-00-00
- Directors
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Herschel Daugherty, John Brahm, Ida Lupino, John Newland, Jules Munshin, Douglas Heyes, Arthur Hiller, Gerald Mayer, Mitchell Leisen, Paul Henreid, Ted Post, John English, Fletcher Markle, László Benedek, Ray Milland, Richard Carlson
- Writers
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Donald S. Sanford, Robert Bloch, Robert Hardy Andrews, Alan Caillou, Charles Beaumont, George Bellak, James P. Cavanagh, Philip MacDonald, Richard Matheson
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Alejandro Rey
Tonio Bellini
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Angela Greene
Mrs. Carlisle
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Argentina Brunetti
Anna Romano
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