The Cutprice Guignol

“I’m here tonight to give you a friendly warning. Do you feel frightened of the dark? Squeamish about blood? Do you who live alone sometimes feel that your hairbrush is not quite where you left it on your dressing table? Do you sometimes feel that the trees in a dark wood are not wholly on your side…?”

That’s the introduction the self-described Man in Black (actually played by Valentine Dyall) offers as introduction to the legendary 1968 BBC chiller series Late Night Horror, in a TV spot meant to warn viewers of the incoming terror about to hit their screens – well, provided they were tuned to BBC 2 at 11pm on a Friday evening. Late Night Horror, though it is almost entirely lost to the annals of time now, served as one of British television’s earliest forays into anthology horror – and, with one episode finally restored nearly fifty years after it first hit screens, we can finally experience this slice of UK horror history in its full, gory glory.

Late Night Horror was a six-episode anthology series of standalone horror shorts, running about twenty-five minutes to half an hour apiece, that was originally broadcast over the course of April and May 1968. It was the UK’s first-ever horror series to be shot in full colour, and adapted a number of short stories from various writers, including Roahl Dahl, Richard Matheson, and Arthur Conan Doyle. A number of directors took up the reins behind the camera, including two of the BBC’s first female directors, Paddy Russell and Naomi Capon and was produced by Harry Moore, the man behind Thirty-Minute Theatre, the broadcaster’s first full-colour drama series. Moore, according to a memo quoted in a really great 2022 book on the show’s production and release, took the “horror” part of the show with the utmost seriousness – “if there is blood,” he told the crew. “Let’s see the blood.”

And see the blood they did. While little remains of the series now, the stories the episodes were based on alongside contemporary TV listings paint a grim picture of everything they explored – from the grotesque body horror of Dahl’s William and Mary, where a recently-widowed woman discovers that her cruel husband’s brain lives on independent from his body, to the vampiric nightmare of Matheson’s No Such Thing as a Vampire (spoiler: there is), the series gleefully made great use of the new colour production for gore, guts, and general nastiness. Even the opening credits, which were one of the few things to remain after the show was initially believed lost, are nightmare fuel, featuring a man’s hand tearing a woman’s face from her skull to leave her looming eye-sockets staring down the camera before the title card shows. Maybe I was just a particularly sensitive child, but I can tell you that even these twenty seconds would have been enough to put me in therapy had I seen them as a kid.

Exactly why the show was abandoned after just six episodes isn’t exactly clear – a BBC report decades later claimed that it had received complaints for being too scary, but, given that it was broadcast a couple of hours post-watershed, it’s not as though it wasn’t aimed at a more mature audience. In terms of actual surviving viewer complaints about the show, a 1970 edition of the Radio Times published a letter from a viewer during a re-broadcast of the series, with said viewer “at a loss” to make sense of what might have driven the broadcaster to create such horror. Either way, the first six-episode season remains the only one to make it to screen – though it would soon be lost to the annals of history, with surviving tapes lost or destroyed in the years that followed.

Much has been made of the fact that most of the episodes of Late Nate Horror are no longer available, with some suggesting that the tapes were destroyed because they were just too disturbing to be kept in the BBC’s archives, but he truth is that a lot of television from this era has been lost for entirely un-nefarious reasons. Many BBC shows and episodes have been lost due to a variety of reasons, including the cost-saving measures of recording over pre-existing tapes, with the requirement to keep archives of previous programming not enacted in the BBC charter till 1981. But the show’s absence and allegedly-horrible content created a kind of myth around its contents, and it became one of the many sought-after losses from the BBC’s archives. After much searching, in 2017, Kaleidoscope, a Birmingham-based organisation focused on the restoration of lost media, discovered a 16mm black-and-white film print of one of the episodes being sold on eBay, and, after some frantic bidding, finally managed to bring a copy of the series back to British TV.

Corpse Can’t Play, directed by Paddy Russell and adapted from a story by John Burke, follows the story of a child’s birthday party, as a young boy named Simon Potter arrives at the event only to bring with him some very creative interpretations of children’s party games. Of course, watching it now, there are elements of the production that seem dated – not least the fact that every adult seems to be permanently about to ash a cigarette into a child’s birthday cake at any given moment – but it’s still a gloriously mean-spirited slice of British horror TV. And even if it’s the better part of sixty years old now, it’s surprisingly effective at times, perhaps because of the focus on a child cast – a child cast that it doesn’t spare from the horror, with the climax showing a little girl holding a de-socketed eye, replete with trailing tissue and gore. While the original colour version is not available, the black-and-white film has been uploaded online, and it’s well worth a watch if you have twenty-five minutes to spare and a love for the slightly-cheesy old horror produced by the BBC in this period.

The rest of the series, sadly, remains lost – though given how long it took to uncover a single episode, I have my hopes that a few more might crop up over the years to come. I would love to hear what you think of this series, and of other British horror classics like it, especially if you happen to have been around for the broadcast of Late Night Horror when it first released. What other horror TV classics should I take a look at next? Let me know in the comments below!

(header image via We Are Cult)