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The Birth of a Genre

Although the first scheduled television broadcasts in the United States were being made as far back as 1928, it was in fact the early 1950s before the cathode tube truly became a nationwide part of American life. As late as 1947, estimates of the number of television sets in the country placed more than two-thirds of the forty-four thousand total in the New York area alone; and, by 1949, network television had still to expand west of the Mississippi.

However, it blossomed fast. By 1951 (the same year CBS commenced the first color broadcasts), the West Coast had been linked to the network; and, from here on in, the haunted fish tank became as integral a piece of the average American household furniture as the sofa, the dinner tray and, from April 3, 1953, the latest edition of TV Guide.

Not that television had everything its own way. Both the movies and the radio had stolen a long head start in the realm of popular entertainment, and while sundry Cassandras did predict (with considerable accuracy) that the goggle-box would eventually leave them both in its dust, for now, Hollywood remained most people’s first choice for moving picture fun; and the radio continued, as it had since before the war, as the primary source of regular, gripping excitement.

Thrilling serials were the order of the day. Police dramas like Dragnet and 21st Precinct; private detectives like Sam Spade, Nick Carter and Perry Mason; Flashgun Casey the Crime Photographer; medical thrillers Dr. Kildare and Dr. Christian; the westerns Doctor Six Gun, Tales of the Texas Rangers and Gunsmoke; supernatural treats like Suspense and Inner Sanctum Mystery; and sci-fi anthologies that pushed out from the blueprints first drawn by the Mutual Broadcasting System’s 2000 Plus and NBC’s Dimension X anthologies (both born in 1950): X Minus 1, Tom Corbett Space Cadet, Space Patrol and so on.

And then there was Adventure Express, which ran for four months between October 14, 1950, and February 17, 1951, to recount the adventures of two children, Billy and Betty, who are joined by Uncle Jim on a railroad tour of the country, in pursuit of thrills and adventure.

Every week took them to a fresh town, there to become embroiled in a new adventure or mystery . . . and every week, one name was beamed into the homes of the Adventure Express’s loyal listeners: its twenty-six-year-old author, Rod Serling. It meant little at the time. But that would soon change.

The Man Who Would Be Twilit

Rod Serling was born in Syracuse, New York, on Christmas Day, 1924—his father Samuel was an amateur investor who now followed in his wife Esther’s father’s footsteps as a grocer (and later, a butcher). They had one son already, Robert, and in later years, he would play his own role in his kid sibling’s television affair. An award-winning journalist, Bob Serling was aviation editor for the United Press International in Washington, D.C., and frequently gave Rod’s flight-related writings a read, to check for any factual errors or to suggest sundry real-life improvements.

It was, after all, an era in which the reality of flight technology was almost as far-fetched as the fantasy of television thrillers, as Rod Serling once joked to the Long Beach Press-Telegram: “With the dramatic development of space aviation these days, I don’t know which of us is writing the most unbelievable stuff, my brother Bob or I.”

In 1926, the Serlings moved to Binghamton, New York, which is where the infant Rod’s showbiz ambitions first came to light. In the basement of the family home, he persuaded his father to construct the small stage on which Rod, occasionally accompanied by neighborhood friends, would perform for the family. Or for himself alone, reciting dialogue lifted from stories in his favorite pulp magazines, or recreating scenes from the first talking pictures.

He was a talker, that’s for sure. Family legend still chuckled at the memory of a family outing from Binghamton to Syracuse, during which Rod did not once stop talking for the entire two-hour duration.

Inevitably, once the boy’s education got under way in earnest, he was recruited to the school debating team, together with any other activities that demanded public speaking, and the only time he could be silenced, it seemed, was either when he was set a writing assignment or when one of his favorite shows was on. Inevitably, he became one of the rising stars of the school newspaper; and, like kids his age all over the country, he lived for radio dramas. Particularly the supernatural ones.

The man who would be twilit. Rod Serling, without whom . . .

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Lights Out

“This is the witching hour, the hour when dogs howl and evil is let loose on the sleeping world. Want to hear about it? Then turn out your lights!”

In 1936, American radio received one of the darkest shocks it had ever been granted, with the relaunch, with a new host, of one of its most reliable old horror series, Lights Out.

Originally produced by Wyllis Cooper, continuity chief at NBC’s Chicago studios, it was launched late in January 1934 as a fifteen-minute serial designed, said Cooper, “to catch the attention of the listener at the witching hour.” Indeed, it was broadcast late . . . at midnight, as Tuesday evening drifted into Wednesday morning, when its signature opening of some vast bell striking twelve would have the greatest effect.

The program soon expanded to a full thirty minutes, and by the time Cooper departed in June 1936, the show boasted over six hundred fan clubs around the country. All of whom were tuning in to hear what Cooper’s replacement, a virtual unknown named Arch Oboler, had to say for himself.

He reinvented the show.

Oboler was not initially a fan of either Lights Out or its late hour of broadcast, although he swiftly grew to cherish it.

The show had no sponsor, which was a mixed blessing in that it allowed writers and cast considerably more creative leeway than if they had some vast commercial concern vetting every word and action. True, it also constrained the budget, but the crew behind the series swiftly grew adept at work-arounds. Besides, the show was always guaranteed a certain popularity, all the more so since most midnight radio in those days was dedicated to musical and variety shows.

But when Oboler’s debut episode was broadcast, suddenly Lights Out became headline news and required listening for anyone who believed their heart could withstand the shock. Which, judging from the fifty-thousand-plus letters that allegedly flooded into NBC to complain about the show, was a very select band indeed.

“Burial Services” was the story of a young girl, paralyzed and helpless . . . but not, as her family, doctors and the undertakers believed, dead. She heard them mourn her, she listened as they discussed her funeral; she was fully aware of the service that committed her body to the soil. And she was wide awake, too, as she was laid in the ground, buried alive because she could not move a muscle to prevent her loved ones from doing so.

It was a nightmarish image, particularly after midnight, and especially when the story was accompanied by the kind of gruesome sound effects that . . . well, throughout its life span, Lights Out would be praised to the skies for the sheer believability of the scrapes and scratches, squelches and squirting that issued from within the action. That particular night, though, how could anybody sleep with the ears still ringing to the sound of the doomed girl’s fingernails, raking at the lid of her coffin?

Oboler relished the terror he had inflicted on his listenership, and while most accounts of Lights Out’s two-year career insist he never again scaled such horrifically macabre heights, he did not cut back on the chills and thrills. Giant earthworms devoured the scientist who created them. Heads would roll, bodies would be crushed, cannibals would chew their living, screaming, prey. Flesh-eating plants, vampires . . . there was no end to the earthbound frights that Oboler hatched on a weekly basis, but even if there had been, he would not have been overly concerned. For out in the stars, many more doubtless abounded, and so aliens came to Earth as well, each of them nurturing ever more vile plans for the insect-like humans that scurried on the planet surface.

When Oboler departed Lights Out in 1938 for a new show, the poetically themed Arch Oboler Plays, many observers believed it was because he’d simply run out of ways in which to improve on the stories he had already written. And maybe he had. But he would return to it in the early 1940s, and again between 1970 and 1973.

The young Rod Serling adored Lights Out, and he hero-worshipped Arch Oboler; a quarter of a century later, in 1963, he even purchased the rights to Oboler’s “What the Devil?,” fully intending it for a berth in season five of The Twilight Zone. The story was fully scripted, and even assigned a production number (#2613), before the production was canceled.

But Oboler was not his sole favorite, just as horror and suspense were not the only topics that exercised his mind. He was a fan, too, of Norman Corwin, the writer whom many have called “America’s poet laureate of radio,” and who turned his pen toward everything from comedy and drama to presidential addresses. It was Corwin, in fact, whom Serling was most keen to emulate when he took his first steps into local radio, undertaking what he described as “some staff work at a Binghamton radio station.” But his attempts to write foundered against editorial indifference, while any academic dreams he might have entertained were scotched when the United States entered World War II in December 1941, and Serling decided to enlist in the military.