Season 1, Episode 36
Original Airdate: June 6,
1961
Writer: John Kneubuhl
(adaptation), Robert E. Howard (original story)
Director: John Newland
Producers: William Frye,
Maxwell Shane
Cast: Brandon De Wilde,
Crahan Denton, David Whorf, Boris Karloff
“Pigeons From Hell” is a
masterpiece of slow-burn horror. At first glance, its creators seem content to
embrace all the usual trappings that are trotted out to achieve cheap,
impact-less scares. But instead of the cheap scares, we are instead treated to
slow tension building over the course of the hour, deliberately paced to get
under the viewer’s skin and linger there.
Tell me if you’ve heard this
one before: Two brothers (Brandon De Wilde and David Whorf) find their car
broken down on an abandoned highway in the middle of nowhere. They come upon a
nearby abandoned mansion… and then the horrors begin to happen. But instead of
a bunch of scares straight out of the Universal B-horrors of the 1940s, writer
John Kneubuhl and director John Newland aim to create the best movie Val Lewton
never produced. It is an adaptation of a great short story by Robert E. Howard
(a writer who inadvertently was the cause of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career by
creating “Conan the Barbarian,” but don’t hold that against him), and in his
adaptation Kneubuhl makes two distinct but very smart changes.
In the original story the
young men are just friends, but here they are brothers. When Whorf’s character
gets an ax to the skull, there is much more emotional resonance for both the
audience and De Wilde’s Timothy. The original story worked fine without it, but
here it gives the death extra significance, especially considering we only have
five minutes with the characters before one is murdered.
Second, the short story takes
place over the course of two or three days and nights, but Kneubuhl condenses
the story to a single, endless night of horrors. That way the atmosphere is
relentless – the characters cannot escape the dark and neither can we.
The most overt horror in the
episode comes early: The aforementioned ax murder. While his brother sleeps,
Whorf’s Johnny is drawn up the stairs of the deserted mansion by ghostly
singing. When Timothy goes searching, he finds Johnny’s skull cracked in two.
But that doesn’t make Johnny any less mobile – his brains still bleeding all
over, Johnny chases Timothy out of the mansion, waving about the ax that was
used to kill him. Despite the grisliness of what I have just described, the scene
is played almost entirely by suggestion. While Johnny stalks Timothy in the
hallway, we never actually see the split skull or the brains… all we see are
drops of blood streaming down the front of his face. Everything else is hidden
by the shadows.
Timothy manages to make it a
few hundred yards away from the mansion before passing out. He is brought to
the nearest Sheriff (Crahan Denton) by a town hick, and when the Sheriff
decides to take the boy back to the mansion to investigate, we get the single inadvertently
funny moment of the episode: The hick busts out of the house they are in and
rushes off into the nearby woods like the Roadrunner escaping the Coyote. De
Wilde, who many will remember for saying “Shane!” a thousand times in the film classic, also has the task of attempting to explain what happened to him in the
mansion while being overcome with grief for his brother, and though his line
readings might come off as hackneyed in another film, his innocent looks and
inability to properly articulate himself actually works in favor of the
character.
The Sheriff takes Timothy
back to the mansion to investigate, and instead of a bunch of boo-scares and
chains rattling, Newland provides viewers with a single, indelible image. Every
time the duo enter the room where Johnny died, their kerosene lantern will not
stay lit. The moment they exit the room, it comes back on. Any fan of a good
horror movie knows the darkness is much scarier than seeing what is in the darkness, and that is never more obvious than here. Also, because there are no
silly noises or faux-climaxes in the sequence, the viewer is consistently on
the edge of his seat. There is no end to the tension until they leave the house
– the threat of something bad happening ensuring the viewer cannot relax.
The atmosphere is only aided
by the black-and-white cinematography, shot by Lionel Lindon (who also shot the
incredible “The Manchurian Candidate” and the minor noir classics “Whirlpool”
and “The Blue Dahlia”). I doubt there’s a shot in the film where everything in
a given set is fully lit. Lindon uses the shadows to play with our expectations
of terror, especially considering a character says early that the swampland is
crawling with snakes. The lighting also makes some old-man makeup that would
doubtless look hackneyed in color into something downright creepy.
Kneubuhl and Newland approach
the episode’s climax with the same slow-burn mentality, refusing to ratchet up
the pace for no good reason. As a result, Timothy’s slow, zombie-like walk up
that decrepit staircase toward his destiny becomes excruciatingly suspenseful.
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| It's all about those eyebrows. |
I got the “Thriller” boxed
set for Christmas this year and have been consistently surprised at the quality
of the episodes. It’s the only hourlong anthology series I’ve seen thus far
that makes good use of its entire running time (unfortunately, “The Outer Limits” often feels like a half-hour show stretched to its breaking point to
fill its hour) on a regular basis. I’ve watched about half the series (the
first season is 37 episodes, so it’s not like I’m being lazy) and find that
even the lesser episodes are still of legitimate quality, and Jerry Goldsmith’s
musical scores are feature-film worthy, even eclipsing Bernard Herrmann’s
scores for “The Twilight Zone.” The show pays homage to the Universal classic
horrors of the 30s, especially with its use of host Boris Karloff (whose
eyebrows here are epic, matched only perhaps by Larry Hagman’s in the “Dallas” reboot), but takes most of its inspiration from Lewton’s horror films of the
40s. Still, every now and then you can see the viciousness of the 50s Hammer
films sneaking in. Since I love all those eras of fright, I feel like a kid in
a candy shop every time I insert a new disc. “Pigeons From Hell” is my
favorite, but I could have easily chosen “The Grim Reaper,” “Parasite Mansion,”
“Late Date” “The Hungry Glass” or “The Purple Room”…and that’s just from the
first season. It’s such a shame this show doesn’t exist in the public
consciousness in the same way “The Twilight Zone” or “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”
does, because it certainly deserves to be.
