Dark Destinations may be end times Night's creature. Why would a few more casualties
struggle me because of their blood? Will join yours a radio drama anthology.
You are wrong how you figure every mark on longos hunting you down? Not
you, your partner, he said, I didn't have a ray gun.
Full cast performances set in the haunted corners of the globe. Darkness is coming
for you. That's the fear that taunts me. Dark Destinations by fatherm Alone
at weirdingwaymedia dot com. Greetings midnight viewers, fall them alone here and I'd
like to welcome you to a special bonus series. We've been slugging it out
in the horror anthology trenches for years now and felt as though the chaff sometimes
overwhelms the bloody wheat. In our discussions. To that end, we've decided
to throw a spotlight on some of the more superlative segments from the various and
disparate series. These aren't arranged in any kind of merit based system nor chronological
That would be way too organized. Instead, I'm starting the series with my
personal favorite episode of The Twilight Zone nineteen eighty five, that was the first
remake or reboot of Ron Serling's classic from the Golden Age of Television. From
that iteration, a veritable dream team of creatives was assembled Wes Craven, Harlan
Ellison, William Friedkin, Peter Meadack, George R. R. Martin Ray,
Bradberry, and on and on. They managed to pay fealty to the
original while carving out a new corner of the zone for themselves. The most
junior member of the writing staff was a fellow by the name of Rockney S
O'Bannon. I was writing, as all you know beginning writers do. I
was writing back everything. I was writing back features. I've spent writing back
episodes of other TV shows that were on at the time. And there was
a show that was on the ABTT a couple of years before the new twilets
On Kimbalong called dark Room, and it was like it was like night Gallery
story but with more twilight, so like stories, and so I wrote a
word play and then another like short half hour pizza for that. It actually
managed to get the scripts into the producers of the show and they very complimentary,
but they said, you know, we were The show has already been
canceled. Oak and they like to tell writing classes. The great thing about
spec material is it it never dissolved, you know it, you know though,
it survives on your on your on your hard drive. So I just
held out of these little half hour scripts that really would have no value otherwise,
and then lo and behold, along came. A couple years later,
along came both Twilight Zone and Amazing Stories, which was the Spielberg version of
kind of a twilight Zone. And was able to submit submit the scripts to
both of them and got very good response to the scripts We're playing particular from
both shows. But then Twilet Zone had me in uh right away and put
Men's staff, which was donning to me because I would have been thrilled to
work on any any crappy universal hour. So so word Player was the first
day I went in. And yeah, I was a huge fan of Harlan
Ellison before learning, and he was going to work on the show. And
he wrote to which I have brained a little paragraph before he ever met me,
a little paragraph review of Wordplay. He was commenting on all the material
that was coming in, incredibly generous and and and Harland was with nothing if
not incredibly opinionated and a vocative, it fighting. So when he liked something,
he really liked them. He really hates something, he really hates them.
So it was like I was I betefit it. I was on the
on the on the positive side of that ledger. The fact that I had
Parland being as kindly praiseworthy as he was was stunning to me. And Harland
was great. He was was everybody on this staff. It was a very
righter centric staff, and and I was the new kid, and you could
not be greener than I would. So I think everything a lot of we're
very patient with me and generous with me, and and Harland very much among
them. To the fabulous introduction to the business and the Harlem alog with Phil
Deegher and Al Bretta. To Jim Crocker, who had the other made up
the rest of the staff that first season perch half of the first eave them.
It was a fabulous entree in the into the bid. Debuting in September
of nineteen eighty five, this new Twilight Zone broke from its predecessor in presentation.
Unlike the originals half hour, this was an hour long show and afforded
its creators the freedom to battle those dread commercial breaks that have always been the
bane of dramatic television, one could conceivably tell an entire tale between the commercials,
and, like Ron Serling's other foray into televised anthology, Night Gallery,
this format allowed several tales to be told in one sitting, which required an
inordinate amount of material. Not only that it had to be good worthy of
the original. That script that Harlan Ellison had praised so effusively and ultimately landed
mister Oben in the job at Twilight Zone wordplay and is as every bit as
incredible as advertised, and as such it will form the basis of a future
episode of this series. Obannon would contribute half a dozen outstanding stories for this
new twilight Zone, and in my humble opinion, was the one writer on
the show who not only understood that this was a new twilight Zone, but
in script after astounding and precient script, he managed to actually deliver a show
that felt both contemporary and out of time. Any one of those stories could
top a Best of twilight Zone eighty five list or horror anthology list in general,
But the one that I tout above all the others, the one that
hit me where I lived, and made me understand the shock and power of
the Twilight Zone in a way I imagine a teen in nineteen sixty two had
felt. When to Serve Man turned out to be the title of a cookbook.
This story aired on November twenty ninth, nineteen eighty five, titled simply
The Shadow Man. When you're thirteen years old, you're supposed to be beyond
those childhood fears of things that go bump in the night. Supposed to be.
But for Danny Hayes, those fears are about to rear up before him
from the shadows of the twilight'son. Danny Hayes is scared not only of the
casual perils of daily life, but taking a stab at any of the awkward
steps through adolescents. But it's worse than that. Danny's fears still dwell in
the shadowed corners of childhood, where the closets hired monsters, And that tamping
at the window isn't a brand. Your father and I could understand this behavior
when you were younger, but you are thirteen years old. Now you're a
young man, and you should not have to sleep with all of these lights
and the TV and the radio ant, but mom no butt. Danny Hayes
is scared and everyone knows it, which does nothing to help the social standing
of the class brain that regularly blows the bell curve through his adherence to extra
credit. Not the best position to attract the attention of Leanna, the girl
he pines for, though it does set him in the sights of her boyfriend
Eric. That was great day. You know. There was some question for
a while, but you man, but not anymore. Your reputation is still
intact. You are still the biggest chicken in Willow Creek. I'm not chicken.
I just not chicken. What do you call running like that? Leaving
poor Leanna the woman you love? Good chicken, Bye bye bye. But
Danny won't be scared for much longer. That night, a figure clad all
in black emerges from beneath his bed, the shack old man, and I
will never harm the person news why True to its otherworldly word, Danny remains
unharmed that evening. The same can't be said for a young couple that were
attacked, landing them in the hospital. While the New Twilight Zone would be
a playground for emerging artists, it also employed some cinema veterans, and in
the case of the Shadow Man, a Twilight Zone veteran. Joe Dante in
nineteen eighty five was white hot from the success of Gremlin's That was his third
solo feature. He had co directed Hollywood Boulevard with Alan Arkish back in seventy
six for Roger Corman's New World Pictures, but it was his collaboration in nineteen
eighty three that showcased his wildly inventive visual style and humor. Dante remade It's
a Good Life for Twilight Zone, the movie. In an interview, he
discussed his time on twilight Zone eighty five. I'd already done an episode of
Amazing Stories too, which made the new Twilight Zone look like Poverty Road.
The eighty Zone revamp was a different animal entirely from the Serling original, which
was economically produced but benefited from the availability of the MGM backlot and studio gloss.
The new series was shot very quickly at the former Republic Studios lot in
Studio City, which only had a tiny backlot. Producer Phil de Guerre was
notorious for post production tampering, and this was one of the first TV series
edited on videotape. This allowed for much editorial mischief, as evidenced by director
Gil Kate's complained that his Paladin of the Last Hour episode was botched by de
guerre in cocaine fueled editing, and when televised, was officially credited to the
fictitious DGA non de plume Alan Smithy. As I recall, Rockley's existing script
was pretty much a take it or leave it proposition. I don't recall much
effort to enlist the directors in choosing material, although I can't believe that Freed
can just happen to end up with Nightcrawlers, which may be the best episode
the series. Once you hand in a TV episode, your involvement is pretty
much over. I never met any of the music guys who are hired long
before I was The music guys he mentioned or guy in this case was Merle
Saunders. Fans of The Grateful Dead will recognize him as a frequent Jerry Garcia
collaborator. Together they'd form Saunder's Garcia Band, which would become Legion of Mary,
then reconstruction on his own. He released the world music classic Blues from
the Rainforest in nineteen ninety as such his work. Here is all dark menace,
with tribal percussion closing in the corners of the frame while the haunted warble
of a theremin plays. Do you believe Eddie Meyer said he's seen it personally?
I wouldn't believe Eddie Myers if he said they're Sandy Dabat. I just
wish they could. I admire me an escape rental patient here was one who
escaped from Peterson's built six months ago. You figure he's been living in the
woods, eat squirrels and birds. Every night the shadow Man rises, and
every night he assures Danny that he'll never harm the person under whose bed he
lives. And every night the attacks continue. But things begin to change for
Danny. The once petrified boy becomes the only one seemingly brave enough to break
curfew and stroll alone along the empty streets of Willow Creek, a bit of
status he lets immediately go to his head, and one that sets him on
a collision course with rival for Leanna's hand. Eric care come, okay,
sure, yeah, I'll fight you, but not now. Tonight at nine
o'clock, the guy for cart That's where the Maniacs has seen the most author
Rockney s O'Bannon, a cab the Libray, remember where the idea came from.
But again, we're trying as hard as we could generally to do to
a bending because that was what obviously til It's done with famous for. And
it's a really tough thing to do because when the original twilet Zoon aired again,
it's with that England short story were pretty commonplace, but certainly on television
that kind of light wasn't expecting that it was wasn't that common. And to
me, the general not even just twist endings, but a general good example
of that is I have the Beholder in the original series, the one which
is entirely the entire other other than the one minute. The entire thing is
predicated on us not seeing any of the characters, and the fact that you
could do that and it wouldn't givoil the ending, I think to me,
was a tribute to the fact that audiences were far more experience in terms of
being set up for a surprise. But here we come whatever twenty plus years
later, and people watched the old Twilight Zones and they were obviously steeped in
that kind of twist ending. So the much harder to hide it, et
cetera. We were always trying to come up with when we could ending it
shows with the twist ending and Shuttleman with my like boxing my version into the
ring of it. And Joe was like, the perfect is the absolutely perfect
choice for him. Obviously he'd done Gremlin shortly before the very high director really
dug the script, and yeah, the intent was just to make it as
absolutely scary as possible, and then to the degree that we speeded, have
it, have it a twist at the end. It's in the silence on
world parlance, it's called a bit bit story, meaning a biter throughout most
of the story. Dugley, he gets a bit at the end points is
on his own guitard if he will. But yeah, it was that.
And but again, Joe so such a such a really good filmmaker and so
totally understood what it what it needed that he was able to create. It
was all on camera, obviously, the Shadowman, who looks two dimensional a
lot of the time, very very oddly. Yeah, yeah, which is
wonderful because it just makes you go, Okay, that's not he's not entirely
human somehow, you know, all that sort of thing, and that's all
cold filmmaking, and Joe was a huge, huge, important contributor to that.
Yeah, obviously when you talk about the twist, because we all got
used to it from the original time I done. It's what I particularly liked
about this episode is it didn't feel like there was going to be a twit,
and I think that's rare well ordinarily, when you see an episode that's
going to be predicated on which you feel it from the opening frame, and
that's what I admired about this episode rewatching it. It doesn't feel like we're
going there at all. Dude. That was one thing that I learned from
the show, and it was innate, I guess and what I was doing
up until then because wordplay does the same thing but it but working on the
show, it crystalized it for me, which is that you can have a
I have the world's shortest attention span. Would but that's the back of the
middle and trained directed, but I do. I really have a critically short
attention span. So things that are all set up just waiting for the twitt
ending are very prostrating to me. I just okay, okay again and I
get to set up just what's going to be the twitt. What I learned
from the TWI that's an experience was try to make the story itself, with
the situation as with it as compelling, and give it escalation as much as
possible so that the story itself is compelling. Don't just rest on the laurel
that you know you could have a twist ending in shadow Man, for example,
it's exactly what you're talking about it. So I think there's there's a
real escalation to his discovery of the shadow Man and how he starts to use
him. Then how is standing with the other kid changes, and the inflation
with the community's reaction to the fact that is going on. All that sort
of thing is all taked into it, so that you know, you make
a very good point which I never realized. It also helps to disguise the
twist as well. Yeah, that to me is why shadow Man with interesting,
compelling whatever leading up to the twist. As you since you've said that's
why, the reason why who look, who's here? Oh my god,
Jenny run any come on? Is something the matter? Hey it's me.
Don't you recognize me? Hey? You said you never heard me the shadow
Man, and I will never hardle a person under news bed and I live
well well, but I am a shadow man from under someone else's bed.
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