The Hat

A horror writer short on ideas and long on desperation leaps at the chance to wear his idol’s lucky hat. It seems the legendary writer could not write without it.

Turns out there is a nasty reason for that…

Grieving Process

A husband struggles to understand and help his wife after a vicious attack causes a monstrous change in her temperament and appetite.

For years I have had this story idea knocking around in my head: a struggling writer starts using a magic typewriter that, regardless of whatever keys are pressed, types out a perfect manuscript. The magic’s cost? An hour of life, for each and every perfect page.

Nifty idea, sure. But this story remains unwritten to this day, because I have never come up with a character strong enough, or a situation interesting enough, to put that vampiric prop to use.

The Hat, the second episode’s first story, offers a ghoulish, gruesome, and entertaining variation on that story concept, though. Of the two, this one is my favorite. I am sucker for stories about writers and stories with monsters. This has both! Win-win, for sure.

I wanted to like Grieving Process, but it touched a nerve I would rather not be touched. So it goes.

Twenty Minutes with Cassandra

“If you walk out, this’ll all be for nothing.“

A quiet evening at home, with a glass of red wine and a pizza, for Lorna (Samantha Sloyan) comes to an abrupt and chilling end when a panicked Cassandra (Ruth Codd) pounds at the door.

Smile

“Smile.“

When the time came for James Harris (Matthew James Dowden) to choose between getting an attention-grabbing photo or saving two lives, he chose the photo.

Now he has won an award for that photo and the time has come from him to pay for it…

In Rod Serling’s Night Gallery: An After Hours Tour authors Scott Skelton and Jim Benson wrote, “An anthology is guaranteed, by its very format, to be uneven. In Night Gallery‘s case, with several story segments per show, wildly so. Within the same hour, some of its best segments collided with its very worst.” [Rod Serling’s Night Gallery: An After Hours Tour, Scott Skelton and Jim Benson, Page 354.] This observation came to mind when I saw that one IMDB “user review” praised Cassandra as a series highpoint, while trashing Smile as one of its absolute worst. An opinion I do not share. I think both stories are solid and an excellent start to the series fourth season.

They also pair very well, as both explore how a person’s secrets or regrets can torment and harm others. Cassandra is the more optimistic of the two, perhaps. Despite all the blood and brutality, I thought there was a heart-wrenching kindness to it. I loved what it did and where it went.

Smile, however, is much darker and far meaner. Serving as an ice-cold reminder of how callous and cruel retribution can be in these mean-spirited morality tales inspired by the Tales from the Crypt, et al of the 1950s. Good stuff.