Tales from the Darkside (1990)

Does anyone remember how the early "Doctor Who" settings and props were somewhat cheap and phony? Much like "Land of the Lost" (1974); "Sigmund and the Sea Monsters" (1973); "H.R. Pufnstuf" (1969-1970); "Electra Woman and Dyna Girl" (1976)...but, they were all GREAT shows because they mainly concentrated on their stories! :)It's the same with this series. This is a cheaply-produced show, but, the stories are great! I really like this series and am quite upset that it hasn't been brought back to television as it well deserves to be.I give this series a solid "9" for it's stories! :)

As a teenager growing up in the 80's, I thought Tales from the Darkside was one of the scariest things on TV. Hell, even the opening scared me with its creepy music and its even creepier narration. Now, 20 some years later I've finally watched them again, thanks to the Sci-Fi channel, and I must say that it has not aged very well. There are a few gems (Trick or Treat, Halloween Candy, The Circus, The Cutty Black Sow), but for the most part, most of these stories come across as being just plain silly. And the low budget doesn't help matters either. It looks like some people at a local TV station decided to make an anthology series. Overall, it just doesn't pack the wallop that it did 20 years ago, but the opening is still creepy as hell. On the plus side, Darkside is way better than Showtime's crapfest Masters of Horror.

I liked the movie just fine.Any movie or series in the vein of Twilight Zone and Amazing Stories always gets my interest. As far as Tales From the Darkside,the series...The stories (Most of them) were pretty well written, while some were pretty cheesy, like the "Highway to Heaven" Halloween episode where the guy with the beard sells his soul to the devil. The twist in the Gargoyle story was pretty good and disturbing. I really wrote in to say the guy a space or 2 above me said, "I don't know if the show is still on" well, it's not. It's been quite a few years since it's been off the air. But I recommend the movie and the series if you can find it. Sci Fi channel ran a TFTDS marathon recently.

The television horror anthology has a long and noble history. In the Fifties, Rod Serling blazed the trail with THE TWILIGHT ZONE; though the series mostly veered in the direction of what may be called "speculative fantasy", it did produce its share of horrific/macabre episodes. This was to be followed by THRILLER in the early Sixties, a much more overtly Gothic series hosted by Boris Karloff, and one of the first television series to catch flack for experimenting with graphic violence (one episode featured a man staggering down a flight of stairs with an ax buried in his head!). Serling struck again with NIGHT GALLERY in the Seventies, an often genuinely weird and experimental series that, like THRILLER, often drew from the great pulp horror tales of the past for inspiration. And, in the Eighties, came George Romero's TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE.I vividly remember the show as a pre-teen; it would premier late at night, around 11:30 after the news and "normal" programming concluded. As that bleary witching hour approached, when the wholesome prime-time like of FAMILY TIES and THE FACTS OF LIFE seemed miles gone by, disorientation and apprehension would set in - the atmosphere was right for a kid to be scared! And nothing was scarier than DARKSIDE's opening sequence. What looked like pastoral postcard scenes of rural Vermont would give way to the ominous intonations of Paul Sparer, backed up by a prickly synthesizer score. The title card would then appear in dripping letters of crimson. It was, in a word, unforgettable.For budgetary reasons, the episodes were shot on video; on the one hand, this gave them an air of cheapness, but on the other lent them a kind of creepy immediacy. The frequent appearance of veteran stars meanwhile, some of who hadn't then worked in years, provided some old-fashioned cachet. Eddie Bracken starred in one I'll never forget - A Case of the Stubborns, based on a story by Robert Bloch. Bracken plays a cranky old grandfather who refuses to accept the fact that he has died, much to the distress of his family. As the days pass, Bracken begins to decompose, to the point of literally sneezing his nose off. Another one that stuck with me was called Inside the Closet, which starred Fritz Weaver as a doctor with a horrible Tom Savini-designed secret locked in his doll closet. One of the (deservedly) best-loved episodes was a Christmas-themed affair called Seasons of Belief. This one had E. G. Marshall sadistically terrorizing his children with stories of The Grither, a sort of demonic Santa being whose name must never be spoken. Building to a truly spectacular conclusion, Seasons of Belief stands out as an endearingly bilious Yuletide classic. In addition to the old-timers, TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE boasted some up-and-coming talent as well - the aforementioned A Case of the Stubborns also starred Christian Slater. Another one I remember, called Monsters in My Room, had little Seth Green as a boy who faces the titular trouble. To further sweeten the package, horror masters like Romero, Savini, and Bloch frequently contributed behind the camera.TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE looms large in the pantheon of Eighties horror (when the genre wasn't afraid to be bold and nasty), as well as in the hearts of those of us who remember it. As it's been off the air for some time, a DVD release may well be in order, so that a whole new generation might behold what gave many Children of the Eighties a pleasant little chill back in the day. As the show's closer immortally put it: "The Darkside is always there, waiting for us to enter, waiting to enter us. Until next time - try to enjoy the daylight."